Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Dynamics of Intergovernmental Lobbying.

概述在美国，近9万个地方政府雇用了1100万名工作人员，负责提供基本的公共服务。其中许多地方政府使用其公共资金的一部分来聘请游说者在联邦政府和州首府代表他们。他们寻求赠款和优惠政策，以增加他们的权力、自主权和机构灵活性。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前因后果知之甚少。调查人员问：如何解释地方政府游说努力的差异，花钱代表游说者是一项好投资吗？这位调查人员提出了一种理论，即政府间游说是地方政府弥补较高级别官员代表性不足的一种方式。她使用游说支出报告、当地政治和人口信息以及公共财政数据来展示哪些地方政府在游说，以及他们从这些游说活动中获得了什么。技术概述调查人员构建了所有50个州的地方政府游说活动的原始纵向数据集。虽然地方政府也游说联邦政府，但鉴于各州拥有在财政、行政和政治上重组地方单位的独特权力，他们的大部分努力都是针对州首府的。尽管由于1995年的《游说披露法案》，联邦游说数据很容易获得，但没有公开可用的州一级游说支出的综合数据集。过去十年，随着州一级的游说活动激增，这种缺乏集中数据的情况变得越来越成问题，往往超过了全国性的游说活动。跨州政府间游说的小组数据将使调查人员能够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。来自加利福尼亚州使用固定效应方法的初步证据以及十多年的城市游说和财政数据表明，当城市接收到新的州议会议员时，它们会分配更多资金用于游说，而在游说上投入更多资金会导致城市从州政府获得更多可自由支配的资金。然而，州一级的制度变量可能是解释地方政府游说努力和结果差异的关键。这个项目为利益集团和财政联邦主义的理论文献做出了贡献，为地方政府如何利用政府间游说相互竞争为其居民提供服务提供了新的经验证据。

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.