La Pira 2
Abstract
Do legislators’ cognitive limitations affect which lobbyists they listen to and which
advocacy arguments they accept or reject? In this paper I report my findings from an original
experiment that simulates how lobbyists communicate with members of Congress. I recruited
139 Washington-based staff in House and Senate personal and committee offices to participate
in an “in-box” simulation that asked them to learn about several policy issues and recommend a
hypothetical health care policy agenda for the 110
th
Congress. The experiment is a 2 x 2
repeated-measures design with four experimental conditions. The experiment includes two
within-subjects factors: (1) Advocacy Argument Quality and (2) Interest Group Credibility. The
first factor is the qualitative nature of the advocacy argument—normative or instrumental—
conveyed by a hypothetical interest group coalition. The second factor is the homogeneity of
organizations that comprise the coalitions, with homogeneous coalitions being credible and
heterogeneous coalitions non-credible. The point of the repeated-measures design was to nullify
the alternative hypothesis that policy decisions are based entirely on pre-existing issue
preferences. I am able to reject the null hypotheses and support my theory that legislative
policymakers use argument quality and interest group credibility as cognitive heuristics when
making decisions about policy priorities. I discuss the implications of my findings for the
lobbying as legislative subsidy model and the deliberative theory of interest representation.
Convention