The lobbying disclosure act at 25: Challenges and opportunities for analysis
Tóm tắt
The Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) will turn 25 years old on December 19, 2020. Between 1998 and 2018, organizations and lobbying firms filed more than one million reports. These reports provide information on the activity of 47,555 organizations, 6834 lobbying firms, and 47,479 individual lobbyists. The interest group scholarly community has put the LDA data to good use over the course of a quarter century of observation. Yet, lobbying disclosures have not been fully leveraged to generate new discoveries about the politics of interest groups, advocacy, legislative studies, and public policy. In this article, we provide an overview of the lobbying disclosure process by describing the idiosyncrasies of the data’s nested and complex structure and the limitations of what information is actually reported. We then assess recent research using LDA data, provide advice on completing research at different levels of analysis, document important changes in data reliability and structure over time, and introduce replication tools to support further research. As the time horizon of lobbying disclosure panel data continues to grow, the LDA—especially when combined with other sources—is an increasingly fruitful way to observe money in politics, legislative behavior, corporate political activity, political consulting, and individual lobbyists engaged in policy advocacy.
Tài liệu tham khảo
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