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All politics is local, but lobbying is federal and local: the validity of LDA data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Austin C. Clemens
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Abstract

The Lobbying and Disclosure Act of 1995 requires lobbyists to disclose information about their lobbying activities. The resulting data is used by the website OpenSecrets.org (run by the Center for Responsive Politics) to give snapshot pictures of the amount of lobbying groups do. The same data has also been used by scholars to measure the impact of lobbying and to evaluate rent-seeking expenditures by firms. Unfortunately, users of the data are unaware of a reporting option for organizations under the LDA that has consequences for the validity of the data. LDA data does not accurately reflect the amount of money that an organization has spent trying to influence federal law because organizations may choose a reporting requirement under which they must also disclose the amount of money they spent to influence state laws. In this article I analyze the implications of this fact. I begin with a discussion of the problem's scope and then show how it misleads scholars.

Type
Research Articles
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , August 2014 , pp. 267 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © V.K. Aggarwal 2014 and published under exclusive license to Cambridge University Press 

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