The vast majority of papers written about interest groups' political influence focuses on the role of money in politics. Business and interest groups' participation in campaign finance, in the form of hard and soft money, has been the subject of hundreds of theoretical and empirical studies. Moreover, with the recent congressional moves to reform campaign finance laws, campaign finance studies have received a prominent position in public discourse.

This paper uses newly available data from the 1995 Lobby Disclosure Act to assess the argument that PAC contributions are used to gain access to legislators. First, we find a much stronger connection between lobbying and campaign contributions than previous statistical research has revealed—groups that have both a lobbyist and a PAC account for 70 percent of all interest group expenditures and 86 percent of all PAC contributions. Second, we find that groups that engage in relatively large amounts of lobbying-and therefore presumably have a high demand for access—allocate their campaign contributions differently than groups that do not. Groups that emphasize lobbying pay more attention to members' positions of power inside Congress, and less attention to members' electoral circumstances, than other groups. Groups that emphasize lobbying also appear to be more bipartisan and less ideological than other groups, giving more equally to both parties and more broadly across the ideological spectrum.

When I was a boy, my family would occasionally receive tall baskets filled with fruits, nuts and jams, most often around the holidays. These gifts from business acquaintances of my father were not meant to be inducements for him to break the law; rather, they were little niceties intended to maintain ongoing relationships. Today, when my wife and I are invited to dinner, we usually bring flowers or a bottle of wine as a gift. This is not some crass attempt on our part to ensure that sanitary conditions are maintained during meal preparation; it is only a symbol of our appreciation for the kindness of our hosts. Not for a moment do I believe that we would be ostracized should we go to dinner engagements empty-handed, nor would my father have punished nongivers. As such, these gift exchanges can be seen as epiphenomena: they symbolize underlying relationships, but they do not constitute relationships.

One of the central concerns about American policy making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions—legislative, administrative, and legal—is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strategies of groups. In this paper we examine in a formal theoretical model how the opportunity to litigate administrative rulemaking in the courts affects the lobbying strategies of competing interest groups at the rulemaking stage. Using a resource-based view of group activity, we develop a number of important insights about each stage that cannot be observed by examining each one in isolation. We demonstrate that lobbying effort responds to the ideology of the court, and the responsiveness of the court to resources. In particular, (1) as courts become more biased toward the status quo, interest group lobbying investments become smaller, and may be eliminated all together, (2) as interest groups become wealthier, they spend more on lobbying, and (3) as the responsiveness of courts to resources decreases, the effect it has on lobbying investments depends on the underlying ideology of the court.

In “The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation,” (hereafter referred to as LLAR), John and Rui de Figueiredo make an important contribution to our understanding of how interest groups choose between lobbying and litigation strategies in the regulation game. Their work demonstrates the value of formally modeling the regulation game by distinguishing between lobbying and litigation. Drawing upon my own related work, in this brief comment I will focus upon some of the implications of formal models of lobbying and litigation for our understanding of how regulatory incentives are affected by judicial review and alternative statutory regimes. I hope to atleast suggest that in addition to illuminating many crucial issues in political science—such as the theory of lobbying and theories of political disadvantage—the sort of approach taken by the de Figueiredos has great significance for the analysis of some fundamental issues in administrative law and public law more generally.

This paper analyzes how the structure of the legislature affects interest groups' incentives to lobby. Lobbying is modelled as the strategic provision of information by an interest group to a multi-member legislature, and the effectiveness of lobbying lies in the ability of information to change the winning policy coalitions. We show that with a long enough time horizon for policymakers, the distinguishing feature between the U.S. Congress and European parliamentary systems—the vote of confidence procedure—reduces an agenda setter's willingness to change policy coalitions, and thus significantly lowers the incentives for interest group lobbying.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that U.S. lobbying expenditures substantially exceed interest group campaign contributions, without including the lobbying that is not required to be reported to the government. Although it has grown in Europe, particularly with respect to the European Union, lobbying is less important than in the United States. Bennedsen and Feldmann (BF) provide an important and insightful explanation for the difference in terms of the institutional structure of governments. They present a model of informational lobbying in client politics where an interest group provides information to a majority-rule (three-member) legislature. The legislature chooses the scale of a program whose benefits can be distributed among legislative districts. The legislative agenda setter has a vote buying problem and allocates benefits to one other legislator to obtain her vote. BF compare legislatures operating with and without a confidence procedure that allows the agenda setter to tie passage of its proposal the continuation of the government. This commentary considers the method for comparing these two institutions, assesses the implications of the theory, and considers future research related to the theory.

This paper examines the relationship between interest group membership, source of authorization, and meeting closure in federal advisory committees. Using observed correlations, it seeks to identify the ultimate source of “inappropriate influence” wielded in advisory committees. The worst offenders in recent years are those committees created jointly by Congress and agencies, and especially certain committees in USDA and DOC. However, these findings may be unique to the last six years, during which the number of closed meetings has tripled.