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Replication Data for: Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SL3VFP
 
Creator Libgober, Brian
Carpenter, Daniel
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Administrative agencies have undertaken an increasingly substantial role in policymaking. Yet the influence-seeking that targets these agencies remains poorly understood. Reporting exceptions under the Lobbying Disclosure Act allow many of the most powerful advocates to characterize their activity as lawyering, not lobbying, and thereby fly under the radar. Using agency-generated records on lobbying activity, financial reporting, and personnel databases specific to lawyers, as well as LinkedIn, we describe a vast subterranean world of regulatory influence-seeking that the social science literature has (mostly) ignored. Regulatory lobbying is systematically different from legislative lobbying. It involves different kinds of people and different lobbying firms, who bring particular forms of expertise and distinct networks. Some of our key findings about how regulatory lobbying differs include: (1) the regulatory lobbying sector is highly segregated from the reported lobbying sector, with many regulatory advocates failing to consistently register or report earnings commensurate with their activity level, (2) the number of non-registered regulatory advocates working on the implementation of a statute plausibly exceeds 150 percent of the registered lobbying population working on that law, (3) the most effective regulatory lobbyists and law firms involved with regulatory lobbying have incomes that dramatically outpace leading reported lobbying firms (which are also mostly law firms), and (4) back-of-the-envelope calculations and more sophisticated decomposition regressions imply that aggregate expenditure on lawyer-lobbying is several multiples of reported lobbying spending. We introduce the case of a particular lawyer-lobbyist and provide theoretical discussion to situate and contextualize these findings. Collectively, this work opens a window into neglected domains of politics and reveals an important understudied form of political inequality.
 
Subject Law
Social Sciences
 
Date 2023-12-06
 
Contributor Libgober, Brian