When Autocrats Purchase Influence in Washington

• In Event: International Dimensions of Authoritarian Rule

Abstract

When do autocrats attempt to purchase influence in Washington? Why? And are they successful? To answer these questions, I exploit the Foreign Agents Registration Act, passed by the US Congress in 1938, to construct a record of every influence activity undertaken by Washington lobbyists on behalf of five of Africa's autocrats since 1990. The dataset includes every campaign contribution to American lawmakers; every email sent, meeting held, and phone call made on the foreign principal's behalf; and every media distributed to American journalists. I find that efforts to purchase influence in Washington spike when Africa's autocrats anticipate violating their citizens' basic rights, either at the ballot box or via human rights abuses. I also find that lobbyists for Africa's autocrats are far more likely to target Members of Congress who have records of public corruption. Finally, using a series of techniques from computational linguistics, I show that media outlets that receive content from lobbyists are more likely to publish positive coverage of Africa's autocrats during the subsequent week than those that do not. Most broadly, the paper makes clear that influence campaigns in Western capitals are a critical tool that Africa's autocrats use to secure their political survival.

Author

• Brett Logan Carter, University of Southern California