The project advances our understanding of the drivers of political representation by analyzing who becomes a lobbyist and why. While previous work has focused mainly on the effects of lobbyists’ connections and skills in the U.S. context, this project is the first to provide a comprehensive cross-national comparison using large-scale individual-level data from the U.S. and Germany. By combining descriptive analysis, machine learning predictions, and causal identification strategies, it shows that both skills and political connections matter for becoming a lobbyist, but that political connections matter more in the U.S. than in Germany. The findings advance the scholarly debate on the composition of the lobbying profession, while also providing insights into how lobbying markets operate in different institutional environments.
The project also breaks new ground in the study of citizens’ preferences for lobbying transparency by investigating support for political disclosure rules across ten developed and developing countries. Earlier research has focused on elite resistance to disclosure, offering little evidence on whether citizens support such reforms. This project fills that gap with a large-scale conjoint survey experiment of over 16,000 respondents. The results reveal widespread support for strict lobbying disclosure requirements and enforcement mechanisms across different country contexts. These findings provide robust evidence that political reforms to strengthen disclosure regimes would align with citizen preferences.
Finally, the project investigates how interest groups influence public opinion. Interest groups spend a lot of money on outside lobbying, such as media campaigns, to influence decision makers indirectly. However, it is unclear to what extent these costly public lobbying strategies can change public opinion. Moreover, previous studies have produced mixed and context-specific results. By conducting a well-powered factorial survey experiment in Germany and the UK, this project provides systematic comparative evidence that interest group messages can have a short-term influence on public opinion. However, the effects are not different from policy messages without interest groups and are only effective for certain policies. The findings deepen theoretical debates about lobbying strategies and inform policy discussions on the regulation of political advocacy and its impact on democratic accountability.
