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The Partisan Logic of City Mobilization: Evidence from State Lobbying Disclosures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2020

JULIA A. PAYSON Open the ORCID record for JULIA A. PAYSON [Opens in a new window]
JULIA A. PAYSON*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
Julia A. Payson, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics New York University, [email protected]
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Abstract

Why do local governments sometimes hire lobbyists to represent them in other levels of government? I argue that such mobilization efforts depend in part on the policy congruence between localities and their elected delegates in the legislature. I provide evidence consistent with this theory by examining how municipal governments in the United States respond to partisan and ideological mismatches with their state legislators—a common representational challenge. Using almost a decade of original panel data on municipal lobbying in all 50 states, I employ difference-in-differences and a regression discontinuity design to demonstrate that cities are significantly more likely to hire lobbyists when their districts elect non-co-partisan state representatives. The results are broadly consistent with a model of intergovernmental mobilization in which local officials purchase advocacy to compensate for the preference gaps that sometimes emerge in multilevel government.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 677 - 690
Copyright
© American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: For comments and suggestions I am grateful to Sarah Anzia, Pat Egan, Sandy Gordon, Catherine Hafer, Andrew Hall, Patricia Kirkland, Dimitri Landa, Terry Moe, Becky Morton, Dan Thompson, and Hye Young You. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for useful feedback and participants at the 2018 MIT American Politics Conference, the 2018 NYU Colloquium on Law, Economics, and Politics, the 2019 Princeton Workshop on Lobbying and Institutional Performance, and the 2019 Berkeley Research Workshop in American Politics. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MYF97D.

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