Business, Fundraising Incentives, and Policy Generalization in the U.S. House

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

Abstract

Legislative specialization among members of Congress is central to policy expertise, which itself is key to national problem solving (Adler and Wilkerson 2013). The importance of specialization is indicated by the very organization of Congress, which according to the informational perspective of congressional organization is designed to generate specialized information in the service of cultivating policy expertise (Krehbiel 1992). Nowhere is the prioritizing of specialization more apparent than in the committee system, where committee membership affords lawmakers access to staff, outside policy experts, interest group representatives, and federal agency officials, all of whom possess highly specialized policy knowledge (Battaglini et al 2019; Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989; LaPira, Drutman, and Kosar 2020; Miler 2021).

There are also at least some individual electoral incentives, mainly fundraising, pushing members toward policy specialization and legislative expertise. Esterling (2007), for example, shows that interest group PACs reward lawmakers with deep analytical knowledge on an issue more than they reward lawmakers who highlight the politically symbolic aspects of the issue. Relatedly, Box-Steffensmeier and Grant (1999) show that business PACs reward members’ legislative effectiveness, while Heberlig and Larson (2022a) demonstrate that such rewards are for effectiveness in specific policy areas rather than a more general legislative effectiveness. PACs especially value members who exhibit legislative effective in highly gridlocked policy areas (Heberlig and Larson 2022a).

And yet, despite some electoral incentives for policy specialization, Volden and Wiseman (2020) find that the vast majority of members are insufficiently specialized to reap the gains in policy expertise that greater specialization would bring. In an earlier paper, we show that the increasing generalization among House members documented by Volden and Wiseman (2020) is explained largely by lawmakers expanding the number of business domains they legislate in. We offer a campaign finance explanation for these trends. In particular, as the number business lobbying groups has grown sharply in the past few decades (Drutman 2015), business group demand for congressional attention has outpaced members’ time and capacity for serving them (McKay 2022). As a result, business groups are willing to reward lawmakers financially for expanding into new legislative domains that help advance business group their policy aims. Empirically, we provided evidence in the paper consistent with this explanation: (1) expansion in the number of business domains a member legislates in results in more business PAC dollars for the member, and (2) the increase in business PAC dollars associated with a lawmaker’s business agenda expansion has grown as business demand for congressional attention has outpaced supply.

In this paper, we take this analysis a step further and try to pin down causality by evaluating whether lawmakers have intentionally shifted their legislative agendas toward business—and away from non-business interests—in order to reap the financial benefits made available by business’s increasing presence in Washington. A finding that members expand the number of business policy domains in which they legislate in order to reap fundraising advantages would have significant normative implications for the way the U.S. House does its business. First, such a finding would demonstrate yet one more way in which moneyed interests are able to gain lawmakers’ attention for their issues at the expense of the issue agendas of less well-heeled groups and constituents (Witko et al 2021). Second, it would also suggest that lawmakers are willing to sacrifice deep policy specialization in favor of a financially more lucrative approach in which they do the bidding of multiple well-heeled interest groups across a larger range of policy domains.

Authors

• Bruce A. Larson, Gettysburg College

• Eric S. Heberlig, University of North Carolina, Charlotte