Trading Legislators for Lobbyists: District Magnitude and Lobbying

• In Event: Lobbyists and Lobbying, Strategies and Goals

Abstract

Some legislatures experience more lobbying by interest groups than others. This issue is of both empirical and normative importance. As an industry, lobbying has grown over time in size (Drutman 2015; Strickland forthcoming). Much of this growth is due to for-profit firms mobilizing politically for the first time. Normatively, scholars posit that interest groups may affect democratic governance negatively by diverting policy outcomes away from the preferences of voters. Policymakers receive feedback only from the interests that organize successfully and lobby, and policy outcomes reflect the interests of those involved stakeholders (Olson 1965; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012). Moreover, special interests may engage in rent-seeking activity that undermines both the provision of public goods and economic growth (Olson 1982). Therefore, understanding the reasons why some legislatures experience more lobbying is itself a question of both empirical and normative importance (Gray and Lowery 1996).

If legislative institutions may be structured in a manner that reduces rent-seeking by special interests, then institutional reforms should be of both scholarly and popular interest. In this study, I examine the effects of district magnitude and legislature size on lobbying by interest groups. A growing body of research explores the effects of district magnitude and size on political corruption or lobbying, but this research presents conflicting theoretical expectations and inconsistent empirical findings. Throughout different studies, magnitude has been hypothesized to have positive, negative, and conditional effects on corruption. For conditional effects, the hypothesized relationship between magnitude and corruption depends on the openness of party lists. There is less research on legislature size and lobbying but it presents a consistent expectation and finding: legislative size is negatively correlated with special-interest influence.

I examine these questions in the context of the American states. The states provide variation in district magnitude and legislature size, and are subject to special-interest lobbying. Scholars of American politics have paid little attention to magnitude or size. On occasion, however, American legislatures experience large-scale reforms that provide opportunities for insight. Such reforms tend to occur independently of other kinds of changes, such as changes to electoral systems or numbers of viable political parties. Whereas cross-sectional analyses of nations tend to examine clusters of states with different electoral systems, the American states provide rare opportunities for observing lobbying across time before and after major reforms, ceteris paribus. For example, countries that use proportional representation (PR) electoral rules tend to feature large district magnitudes and closed party lists. This makes statistical testing of hypotheses difficult. Using information from the American states, I leverage three reforms to determine if changes in legislative institutions but not party systems affect numbers of organizations that lobby. Using a synthetic control method, I find that a reduction in district magnitude and legislature size initiated an increase in organizations lobbying legislators in Illinois (where, I argue, elections have an open-list dynamic). With additional analyses, I find that increases in legislature size alone did not lead to any changes in organization numbers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

My findings suggest that district magnitude or multi-member district (MMD) status, but not legislature size, affects lobbying by interest organizations. In particular, transitioning the Illinois House of Representatives from three-member districts to single-member districts (SMDs) resulted in an approximately 25 percent increase in organizations that lobbied. Moreover, this was an enduring effect: once new interests mobilized, they stuck around for future legislative sessions. Ironically, this result suggests that voters in Illinois, in approving a constitutional amendment to reduce district magnitude and the size of the house, exchanged legislators for lobbyists. This result aligns with anecdotal evidence that the amendment decreased political accountability in Illinois. It also aligns with statistical correlations based on democracies around the world (e.g., Persson, Tabellini, and Trebbi 2003).

Author

• James Manning Strickland, Arizona State University