Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
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 110th 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.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In a re-evaluation of the conditional lobbying thesis, we suggest that what often is viewed as “lobbying” is in fact information coordination between motivated members and interested lobbyists.