Timing is Everything? Organized Interests and the Timing of Legislative Activity

Berkhout, Joost and Carroll, Brendan and Lowery, David and Toshkov, Dimiter (2011) Timing is Everything? Organized Interests and the Timing of Legislative Activity. [Conference Proceedings]

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Abstract

Different perspectives on the role of organized interests in democratic politics imply somewhat different temporal sequences in the relationship between legislative activity and the influence activities of organized interests. Unfortunately, a lack of data has greatly limited any kind of detailed examination of this sequence. We address this problem by taking advantage of the temporally very precise data on lobbying activity provided by the door pass system of the European Parliament (Berkhout and Lowery 2011). After reviewing the several different perspectives on the timing of lobbying and legislative activity, we present the data used in our analysis and then use them to consider the larger issue of what our findings can tell us about the role of organized interests in democratic politics and, more importantly, our theories of organized interests in the policy process.

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