@article{d4033a2a9e3c4f1abaccc52e539f4a78,
title = "Legislators as Lobbyists",
abstract = "Public policy is produced by elected and unelected officials and through the interactions of branches of government. We consider how such interactions affect policy implementation and representation. We argue that legislators try to influence bureaucratic decisions through direct communication with federal agencies, and that such contact is effective and has consequences for policy outcomes. We provide empirical evidence of this argument using original data about direct communication between members of Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) along with decisions made by the DOL regarding trade and redistributive policies. We find that direct contacts influence DOL decisions, and the agency is more likely to reverse previous decisions when requested to do so by legislators. Our results challenge key assumptions and findings in the previous literature and have important implications for interbranch relations and informal means of control over the implementation of national policy.",
keywords = "Congress, bureaucracy, interbranch, legislators, public policy, representation, trade",
author = "Ritchie, {Melinda N.} and You, {Hye Young}",
note = "Funding Information: Our results cast doubt on assumptions of the extant literature about the importance of the individual-level characteristics of legislators. interestingly, we do not find evidence that agencies favor members of leadership or committees with jurisdiction over the agency. this departs from literature that emphasizes the institutional power of legislators to control the bureaucracy (e.g., arnold 1979). We also do not find that agencies are more responsive to requests from majority-party legislators or presidential copartisans, suggesting that while these legislators may enjoy expedited responses (Lowande, n.d.), this advantage may not extend to the actual outcomes of decisions. Critically, our results suggest that any legislator—even legislators who lack power within the chambers of Congress—can improve outcomes for their constituencies through efforts in the bureaucratic venue. these findings depart from previous literature in two additional ways. First, much of the previous work has omitted consideration of direct requests between legislators and agencies when empirically analyzing agency decisions (but see Mills, Kalaf-Hughes, and Macdonald 2016; Neiheisel and Brady 2017). second, we go beyond previous work, which has focused on grants and other discretionary allocations, by examining the case of trade adjustment assistance, a redistributive program funded by mandatory spending. Our examination of this case offers an important contribution by examining agency decision making when bureaucrats are not as restricted by competing principals{\textquoteright} interests over limited resources. Of course, agency responsiveness may vary across agencies and types of decisions, and we think that it is likely that institutional power and electoral politics may play a greater role in other cases, particularly when discretionary grants and allocations are involved. still, we argue that this case study contributes insight into the countless, important nondistributive policy decisions agencies manage beyond the discretionary grant programs examined in previous work. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 Washington University in St. Louis",
year = "2019",
month = feb,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1111/lsq.12221",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "44",
pages = "65--95",
journal = "Legislative Studies Quarterly",
issn = "0362-9805",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell",
number = "1",
}