Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Dynamics of Intergovernmental Lobbying.

概述在美国，近9万个地方政府雇用1 100万名工作人员，负责提供基本公共服务。这些地方政府中的许多都用一部分公共资金雇佣游说者在联邦政府和州政府面前代表他们。他们寻求赠款和有利的政策，以增加他们的权力，自主权和机构的灵活性。然而，利益集团关于游说的文献在很大程度上忽视了这一现象，因此我们对政府间游说的原因和后果知之甚少。研究者问：如何解释地方政府游说努力的差异，花钱请说客代表是一项好的投资？研究者提出了一种理论，即政府间游说是地方政府弥补高层官员代表性不足的一种方式。她利用游说支出报告、地方政治和人口信息以及公共财政数据来展示哪些地方政府进行游说，以及他们从这些游说活动中得到了什么。技术摘要调查者构建了一个关于所有50个州的地方政府游说的原始纵向数据集。虽然地方政府也游说联邦政府，但他们的大部分努力都是针对州政府的，因为州政府拥有在财政、行政和政治上重组地方单位的独特权力。虽然联邦游说数据是现成的，由于1995年游说披露法，不存在可供选择的复合数据集的国家一级的游说支出。由于过去十年来州一级的游说活动激增，往往超过全国性的游说活动，这种缺乏集中数据的情况变得越来越成问题。跨州政府间游说的面板数据将允许调查人员采用几种策略来确定地方政府游说的相关性，并估计这种行为的影响。来自加州的初步证据使用固定效应方法和十多年的城市游说和财务数据显示，当城市接收新的州议会成员时，他们会分配更多的钱用于游说，并且在游说上花费更多导致城市从州获得更多的自由裁量资金。然而，在州一级的制度变量可能是关键，以解释在地方政府的游说努力和结果的变化。本研究通过对地方政府利用政府间游说相互竞争为居民提供服务的方式提供新的经验证据，为利益集团和财政联邦主义的理论文献做出了贡献。

General SummaryIn the U.S., nearly 90,000 local governments employ 11 million workers and are responsible for delivering essential public services. Many of these local governments use a portion of their public funds to hire lobbyists to represent them both before the federal government and their state capitals. They seek grant money and favorable policies that will increase their power, autonomy, and institutional flexibility. However, the interest group literature on lobbying has largely neglected this phenomenon, and as a result we know little about the causes and consequences of intergovernmental lobbying. The investigator asks: What explains variation in lobbying efforts by local governments, and is spending money on lobbyist representation a good investment? The investigator develops a theory that intergovernmental lobbying is a way for local governments to compensate for weak representation by higher-level officials. She uses lobbying expenditure reports, local political and demographic information, and public finance data to demonstrate which local governments lobby and what they get as a result of these lobbying activities. Technical SummaryThe investigator constructs an original longitudinal dataset on local government lobbying in all 50 states. While local governments also lobby the federal government, the majority of their efforts are targeted towards their state capitals, given the unique authority that states have to restructure local units financially, administratively, and politically. Although federal lobbying data is readily available as a result of the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, there exists no publically available composite dataset of state-level lobbying expenditures. This lack of centralized data has become increasingly problematic as lobbying at the state level has soared over the past decade, often outpacing national lobbying efforts. Panel data on intergovernmental lobbying across states will allow the investigator to employ several strategies to identify the correlates of local government lobbying and estimate the effects of this behavior. Initial evidence from California using a fixed effects approach and over a decade of data on city lobbying and finance shows that cities allocate more money to lobbying when they receive a new state assembly member, and spending more on lobbying leads cities to secure more discretionary funding from the state. However, institutional variables at the state level are likely key to explain variation in local government lobbying efforts and outcomes. This project contributes to the theoretical literature on interest groups and fiscal federalism by providing new empirical evidence on the way in which local governments use intergovernmental lobbying to compete with each other to provide services for their residents.