What happens when governments hire lobbyists? In the U.S., governments are among the most active lobbying groups. Local governments frequently lobby their state capitols, and both state and local officials lobby the federal government. Despite the ubiquity of intergovernmental lobbying, interest group scholars rarely study governments as lobbyists. As a result, we lack systematic evidence about the conditions under which local governments lobby and the effects of this behavior on public policy.

The NSF Doctoral Dissertation Award provided me with the tools to begin answering these questions. I used the award to support an intensive data collection effort that culminated in newly compiled longitudinal data on lobbying disclosures in all 50 states. Marshaling this evidence in conjunction with other original qualitative and quantitative data, I developed a theory of intergovernmental lobbying that emphasizes the role of political geography. One of the distinguishing features of local governments as interest groups is that they are geographically nested within state and federal legislative districts that serve the same constituents. They are, by definition, represented by elected officials whose job is to advocate for local needs. Sometimes, these elected officials proactively promote local interests. But other times, they are less attuned to local concerns. When local governments hire lobbyists, they are essentially purchasing additional advocacy to advance their interests at the state or federal level.

However, the potential upsides of municipal lobbying are accompanied by equity concerns. Because lobbying is expensive, large and wealthy cities may have an advantage when it comes to buying representation. One of the empirical puzzles in the literature on federalism is that rich areas often secure more funding from the central government, even when transfer systems are designed to redistribute revenue to less advantaged regions. If affluent cities are able to influence state policy by hiring lobbyists, then lobbying might provide one mechanism by which these cities maintain their economic advantage.

In the dissertation, I begin by painting a detailed descriptive picture of the current municipal lobbying landscape in the U.S. I then I delve more systematically into the question of why some local governments lobby while others don't. Using panel data on annual city lobbying activity in all 50 states, I find support for the idea that lobbying serves as a way to bridge ideological gaps between state and local officials. However, I also find that size and wealth are major determinants of the decision to lobby, indicating that smaller, more disadvantaged communities may be less likely to benefit from the ability to lobby.

In the third chapter, I examine the state-level factors that increase or decrease the overall level of local government lobbying. Cross-sectionally, states with term limits and those with more professionalized legislatures experience lobbying by a higher proportion of their cities. This finding suggests that one of the possible benefits of intergovernmental lobbying is that it facilitates representation by elected officials in complex, information-rich legislative environments.

In the fourth chapter, I estimate the returns to lobbying for individual municipalities and use a difference-in-differences design to show that lobbying the state dramatically increases the amount of overall revenue that cities generate in the following year. I also find that lobbying the federal government does not have the same effect, indicating that this additional revenue likely originates from changes to state-level policy and spending. However, not all localities benefit equally from lobbying. I demonstrate that wealthy cities with higher median incomes---and particularly those in the top tercile of the income distribution---receive substantially more revenue after lobbying than less affluent cities. 

In the fifth chapter, I consider how local lobbying affects the overall distribution of transfers at the state level. Using changes in the proportion of cities lobbying between 2007 and 2012, I discover that as the number of cities lobbying increases, state transfers to local government become less progressive. The data show that this effect is driven primarily by the lobbying decisions of high-income municipalities, providing additional evidence that lobbying may contribute to local inequality.

There are several key takeaways from this research. Lobbying can provide local officials with an alternative way to advocate for local interests in state government when they believe their elected representatives are not doing enough. But the benefits of intergovernmental lobbying are not equally distributed. Instead, wealthy municipalities lobby disproportionately and experience greater monetary returns when they do. My results suggest that one reason why states have been so ineffective at reducing local revenue inequality is because rich cities are able to translate their economic advantage into political power through lobbying.

Last Modified: 07/26/2017
Modified by: Julia A Payson