Politics
How powerful are lobbyists? Here are the instructions to answer that question
The how-to guides to understanding money and politics
By Heath Brown, City University of New York, and Beth Leech, Rutgers University
Political scientist Douglas Arnold once called the study of interest groups “theory rich and data poor,” noting that those who studied interest groups, unlike those who studied electoral behavior, had not benefited from large-scale, institutionally financed data collection (1982). This critique, which continued in different forms into the 1990s, is no longer true today, and a new special issue of Interest Groups & Advocacy clearly shows this. A wealth of data are now available for free, online, and in user-friendly formats.
Thirty years ago, if you wondered how many lobbyists there were in the US, you’d be out of luck. Available data could only offer some educated guesses. That changed in 1995 with the passage of the US Lobbying and Disclosure Act (LDA). As these data have moved from microfiche to online databases, as Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas III (2020) explain, how the task of organizing the LDA data has become somewhat easier, but the data are still sometimes tricky to deal with. The answer to the question, for what it’s worth, is something close…
