In Pursuit of the Agenda: The Strategic Deployment of Revolving Door Lobbyists

We contend that interest groups strategically deploy access-oriented revolving door lobbyists to influence legislation that is prioritized by party leaders in Congress. Alternatively, policy-oriented conventional lobbyists seek to influence legislation that matches their domain of expertise, regardless of its status on the agenda. We test these expectations by linking our original data set of 1,600 lobbyists and their professional backgrounds with Congressional Bills Project (Adler and Wilkerson 2014) data on legislative progress and policy topics. We confirm our expectation that lobbyists with previous government experience are more likely to lobby on high priority bills. We infer that greater access to higher priority legislation explains why revolving door lobbyists are associated with rare changes to the status quo (Baumgartner et al 2009).