Current Projects

I am currently involved in several research projects on the structure of the Washington interest group system and lobbying influence.  Pending funding, I plan to start a new collaborative project to collect the “specific issues” data from lobbying disclosure reports in the near future.  Currently, the Center for Responsive Politics extracts a sample of “bills” from electronically-filed reports.  However, this sample–which I estimated to be less than 40% of all issues mentioned in the reports–is biased towards legislation that is commonly referred to by Congress’s bill-numbering procedure.  In practice, that means that appropriations and annual reauthorizations are overrepresented, and niche issues on which many lobbyists focus their efforts are ignored.

Papers

See my website for links to publications and conference papers.