The Interest Group Connection: Money, Access, and Support (original) (raw)
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Term Limits and Campaign Contributions: Do Lame Ducks Suffer?
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We explore the impact of term limits on power in the California legislature. Using campaign contributions to legislators as an indicator of individual power, we compare the relative influence of caucus leaders, committee chairs and rank-and-file legislators. We also compare a sample of committee chairs in the Assembly and Senate. The results indicate that term limits diffuse power in both chambers, but in different ways. In the Assembly, the caucus leadership loses power relative to other members. In the Senate, however, caucus leaders gain power at the expense of committee chairs. Finally, the changing proportion of institutional contributions in both chambers demonstrates a shift in power to the upper chamber, a finding that suggests the impact of term limits is attenuated in a bicameral system.
Political Research Quarterly, 2022
Interest groups seek to influence parliamentarians' actions by establishing exchange relationships. We scrutinize the role of exchange by investigating how interest groups impact parliamentarians' use of individual parliamentary instruments such as questions, motions, and bills. We utilize a new longitudinal dataset (2000-2015) with 524 Swiss parliamentarians, their 6342 formal ties to interest groups (i.e., board seats), and a variety of 23,750 parliamentary instruments across 15 policy areas. This enables us to show that interest groups systematically relate to parliamentarians' use of parliamentary instruments in the respective policy areas in which they operate-even when parliamentarians' time-invariant (fixed effects) and time-variant personal affinities (occupation, committee membership) to the policy area are accounted for. Personal affinities heavily moderate interest groups' impact on their board members' parliamentary activities. Moreover, once formal ties end, the impact of interest groups also wanes. These findings have implications for our understanding of how interest groups foster representation in legislatures.
The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States
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Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office-whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition-but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a "Burkean shift," whereby term-limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.
Fired? Or Firing Up? How Term Limits Affect Career Politicians
American Review of Politics, 2007
Customarily professional legislators are thought to behave more strategically than other legislators in their quest for higher office (Canon 1990; Jacobson and Kernell 1983). The implementation of term limits upsets all the traditional career parameters by restructuring the incentives to remain in political office. For this reason, we posit the following questions: how much difference does a legislature’s level of professionalism make in how members respond to term limits? How do term limits affect legislators’ responsiveness to available opportunities and willingness to take risks to continue their careers? We use a comparative case study approach and pooled cross-sectional data to analyze individual career decisions of legislators in seven states with varying levels of professionalism and term limit laws from 1992-2002. Using multinomial logit, we find that decisions to seek other offices in response to term limits are highly contingent on a state’s level of professionalization.
The Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, 2008
The complexities of modern society increase the amount of necessary government actions and decrease the amount of deliberation that goes into them. The resulting strain on our policymaking system leads government officials to rely on lobbyists and leads lobbyists to fight viciously for influence over government officials. Symptoms of this problem surface with scandals such as the Abramoff affair and trends such as the recent lobbying boom. These instances of corruption and inefficiency in congressional practices have renewed interest in lobbying reform. While lobbyists provide legislatures with benefits such as information and representation of special interests, lobbying often becomes a spending war between conflicting interests that consume the efforts of both legislators and advocacy groups. Currently, the only limitations over lobbying practices are disclosure laws that require lobbyists to reveal their lobbying activities after spending a certain amount influencing officials. Mediation may offer an adaptable and widely-beneficial mechanism in congressional lobbying practices. If Congress had the power to push opposing interest groups to enter mediation after spending a certain amount in lobbying on an issue, they may be able to preclude costly, indirect fighting by reaching consensus over policy action. Opening and facilitating communication among interests may help to improve legislation and reduce corruption that is associated with interest group pressure. This process would combine existing, established lobbying practices with two simple legislative mechanisms to decrease malignant lobbyist activity and improve the quality of public policy. Aside from solving problems, this proposal offers a model for the optimal use of lobbyists in congressional practice and broader implications of increasing the democratic value of government institutions to better fit modern conditions. Part II of this Note describes the lobbying boom and its negative consequences. Part III presents the basic idea of interest group mediation as the solution to the inefficiency and corruption involved with current lobbying practices. Part IV describes existing governmental structures that use mediation in creating consensual public policy such as negotiated rulemaking and public dispute resolution. Part V explains the mechanisms Congress will need to create in order to implement this process. Finally, Part VI draws broader implications on optimal lobbying practices and on using interest group mediation to improve the democratic value of legislative enactments.