The Roles of Ideology and Policy Expertise in Federal Agency Lobbying

• In Event: Bureaucratic Agencies and Political Pressures

Abstract

Federal agencies play important roles in the implementation of policy, and thus are attractive forums for lobbying. We explore the roles of ideology and policy expertise in explaining how lobbyists are linked through lobbying to federal agencies. We begin by examining the ideological alignment between lobbyists and federal agencies, measuring lobbyist ideology using campaign finance donations and agency ideology through two established measures in the literature. Following this, in order to obtain a more complete description of how lobbyists are organized across agencies, we use an exploratory factor analysis to split agencies into separate domains based on common lobbyists. Preliminary analysis suggests that the factors identified appear as policy domains, supporting the claim that agency lobbying is organized by issue areas rather than primarily by ideology.

Authors

• Peter Bils

• Richard W. DiSalvo, Princeton University