Campaign Contributions and Access to Congressional Offices: Patterns in Foreign Lobbying Data

Abstract

Do lobbyists contribute money to legislators to build relationships in government? I show that lobbyists deploy resources strategically to get access to officials by analyzing newly available data on foreign lobbying in the U.S. government from 1998 to 2019, which contain information on lobbyists’ campaign contributions and contact with officials. Using supervised machine learning models, I identify lobbyist requests for access to members of Congress and classify them as either successful or unsuccessful. The data show that lobbyists request access almost exclusively to legislators to whom they made campaign contributions. Furthermore, lobbyists who contributed money to legislators are more likely to gain access to them than lobbyists who did not, but only if the legislators are ideologically similar and in the same party. While the data and research design I employ do not allow me to infer causal influence of contributions on access, these results suggest that lobbyists make contributions to foster an environment conducive to contact with like-minded officials.