17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Arnaud Dellis
Discussant/s:
Markus Baumann
Meeting Room C

In Song Kim, Jan Stuckatz, Lukas Wolters
Strategic and Sequential Links between Campaign Donations and Lobbying

Samuel Mueller
Ask, And You Shall Receive - Strategic Information Transmission in the Public Consultation Procedure of the European Commission

Arnaud Dellis
Legislative Informational Lobbying
Strategic and Sequential Links between Campaign Donations and Lobbying
In Song Kim 1, Jan Stuckatz 2, Lukas Wolters 3
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2 Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST)
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

We offer the first large-scale analysis of the direct link between campaign donations and lobbying — two distinct political activities that have been mostly studied separately. Using over 75 million U.S. federal lobbying reports and campaign contribution filings since 1999, we show that interest group donations are directly related to their subsequent lobbying efforts and the legislative activities of the targeted politicians. To analyze this sequential link, we use difference-in-differences estimation combined with matching, comparing firms that donate to a politician against a set of comparable firms with no donation history to the same politician. We find that donations result in an 8.5 to 10 percentage point increase in the probability that the targeted politician engages in legislative activities related to the bills lobbied by the donating firm. The estimated effects are large, short-term, and particularly pronounced for committeerelated activities. Our findings question the common perception of donations as driven either by ideology or long-term investment strategy of interest groups.