Since 1990, the American states have adopted a variety of reforms to regulate lobbying in an attempt to address a host of ethical issues. Such regulation can have important impacts on a variety of aspects of the legislative process because it typically impacts the relationships between legislators and lobbyists. How does such lobbying regulation vary across the states and over time? I have developed a measure of state lobbying regulation from 1990–2003. This measure validly captures the laws that limit relationships between lobbyists and legislators and, as such, can be used to help assess a variety of hypotheses about the legislative process.
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