@article{7a19ad97ff454706807a06301ceb8c3d,
title = "Cities in the statehouse: How local governments use lobbyists to secure state funding",
abstract = "What happens when local governments hire lobbyists? Although intergovernmental lobbying is common in the United States and other federal systems, we know little about its consequences. Using newly compiled data on state-level lobbying across the country, I establish a positive correlation between city lobbying and state funding. I then introduce over a decade of panel data onmunicipal lobbying in California to estimate the returns to lobbying for cities with a difference-indifferences design. I show that lobbying increases state transfers to cities by around 8%. But the benefits of intergovernmental lobbying are not equally distributed. I find that cities with higher levels of own-source revenue per capita net more statemoney when they hire lobbyists, despite enjoying a local revenue advantage. These results offer some of the first empirical evidence that city officials can influence state spending by lobbying—but this behavior may also perpetuate local economic inequality.",
author = "Payson, {Julia A.}",
note = "Funding Information: Julia A. Payson (
[email protected]) is an assistant professor at New York University, New York, NY 10003. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse .harvard.edu/dataverse/jop). An online appendix with supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/706767. Support for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation (Dissertation Improvement Grant award 1560599) and the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. 1. See http://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/lemoore-corcoran-avenal-get-million-for-police-projects/article_59df1fa0-c52f-5b98-8d19-cd6e849c44c6.html. 2. In 2006, e.g., 478 cities lobbied the federal government, and 801 lobbied at the state level. Data available at http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby /indusclient.php?idpW03&yearp2006 and http://classic.followthemoney.org/database/graphs/lobbyistlink/index.phtml. 3. California lobbying data are available at cal-access.ss.ca.gov/Lobbying/. See fig. A1 for California lobbying expenditures by interest sector over time. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.",
year = "2020",
month = apr,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1086/706767",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "82",
pages = "403--417",
journal = "Journal of Politics",
issn = "0022-3816",
publisher = "University of Chicago Press",
number = "2",
}