Lobbyists as Gatekeepers: Occupational Turnover among Lobbyists

• In Event: US Lobbying as Individual and Group-Specific Practice

Abstract

Recent scholarship suggests that lobbyists are able to capitalize on their personal relationships with lawmakers, and that turnover among legislators harms lobbyists’ personal incomes and client counts. Lobbyists who are able to capitalize on personal relationships serve as gatekeepers for lawmakers (as in Hirsch et al. 2023), and their presence undermines the ability of various interests, particularly those without significant monetary resources, to achieve access to lawmakers and influence over policy. Those concerned with equality in representation should be concerned about the presence of gatekeeper lobbyists. If one accepts that the merits of policy positions are independent of the resources of their advocates, then the presence of lobbyists who stand between lawmakers and organized interests, and who profit from their gatekeeping abilities, should be of immediate concern.

In this study, I propose that legislative turnover is a consistent predictor of turnover or occupational exit among lobbyists. Existing research (e.g., Blanes i Vidal, Draca, and Fons-Rosen 2012; McCrain 2018; Strickland 2023) suggests that former legislators acting as lobbyists experience wage declines, and elevated exit rates, when former co-workers in legislatures retire. All lobbyists, however, may develop relationships with lawmakers and serve as gatekeepers, and other research suggests that compensation is a major determinant of employee persistence and recruitment (Van der Heijden et al. 2018; Li et al. 2019; Carless and Imber 2007), including legislators (Squire 1988). There is little reason to believe that such correlations (found among other professionals such as teachers and nurses) may not be found among lobbyists.

To date, scholars have a limited understanding of turnover or persistence among lobbyists. Nearly all the existing research on turnover in lobbying examines churn among organized interest or lobbyists’ clients. For example, Walker (1991), Gray and Lowery (1996), Nownes (2004), Berkhout and Lowery (2011), and Kerr, Lincoln, and Mishra (2014) all examine the founding dates or lobby persistence of particular organizations. None of these studies examine turnover among the lobbyists of the organizations. Rather, scholars merely have descriptive statistics about lobbyists’ years of experience (see Zeigler and Baer 1969; Berry 1977; Heinz et al. 1993), and have employed “experience” as a statistical control when testing hypotheses using regression (e.g., Nownes and Freeman 1998; Bath, Gayvert-Owen, and Nownes 2005; Lucas and Hyde 2012).

To measure turnover among lobbyists, I use lists of registered lobbyists spanning multiple decades and states. In particular, I examine the names of lobbyists that appeared in lists across years, and then use these counts to test various hypotheses regarding turnover and persistence among lobbyists. At the level of states, turnover is measured as the number of lobbyists who remained registered from one period to the next. Just as Shin and Jackson (1979) did for legislative turnover, I examine turnover for lobbyists for each decade, but from the 1940s to the 2010s, a historical period in which turnover declined among state legislators remarkably (see Moncrief, Powell, and Niemi (2004), and for a subset of states where lobbyist lists are available.

Existing research and my theory suggest that legislator turnover is a consistent predictor of lobbyist turnover. Other factors, however, such as chamber size, interest demand, and opportunity costs for lobbyists, should also predict turnover rates. I cannot rule out the possibility of interactive or multiplicative effects. Moreover, when examining the numbers of lobbyists who persisted from one decade to the next, numbers of registered lobbyists should be held constant. I plan to estimate a series of negative-binomial models with various specifications to test my primary hypothesis of interest (i.e., regarding turnover’s effects) and various other direct and interactive effects.

Ultimately, this project will inform scholars’ understanding of how legislative institutions affect the representation of organized interests. If legislative turnover is correlated positively with lobbyist turnover, then the past few decades have likely seen the rise of gatekeeper lobbyists in the states who command premiums in exchange for their services. As mentioned, such gatekeeping challenges the ideal of equal representation, and gatekeepers may also undermine the representation of individual clients by shirking. Indeed, multi-client lobbying has increased in prevalence over the past few decades in both the states and Congress (Strickland and Crosson 2023; Drutman 2015).

Author

• James Manning Strickland, Arizona State University