We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly, representational biases in legislative lobbying are replicated across venues: business groups dominate administrative lobbying at least as much as they do legislative lobbying. Finally, the level of interest group activity in one venue for a given policy area is strongly related to its level in the other venue. The findings potentially have important implications for the impact of institutional design on both the form and promotion of broad participation in policy-making as well as the ultimate content of policies chosen by democratic governments, broadly construed.

This article asks what shaped immigrant policy in the 50 states between 2005 and 2011. Theoretically, politicians are influenced by electoral considerations as they craft laws. Law-makers consider both current public opinion and how the electorate is likely to change, at least in the near future. Empirically, the article analyses an original dataset on immigrant-related laws enacted by the states with a Bayesian spatial conditionally autoregressive model. The analysis shows that state immigrant policy is affected primarily by legislative professionalism, electoral ideology, state wealth and change in the foreign-born population.

Spain's newspapers are characterised by strong partisan identities. We demonstrate that the two leading newspapers nonetheless show powerful similarities in the topics of their coverage over time. The media system is strongly related to the policy process and it shows similar levels of skew (attention focuses on just a few topics) and friction (attention lurches rapidly from topic to topic) as others have shown for policy processes more generally. Further, media attention is significantly related to parliamentary activities. Oral questions in parliament track closely with media attention over time. Our assessment is based on a comprehensive database of all front-page stories (over 95,000 stories) in El País and El Mundo, Spain's largest daily newspapers, and all 7,446 oral questions from 1996 to 2009. The paper shows that explanations of friction and skew in governmental activities should incorporate media dynamics as well. Political leaders are clearly sensitive to media salience.

In a quantitative study using unique quarterly data across two decades, this article addresses the opposition's opportunities to influence policy; a topic that has been neglected in existing party-policy research. The idea that is developed is applied to a remarkable policy development on crime during the Danish leftwing government in the 1990s. Contrary to its policy position when it took office in 1993, the leftwing government repeatedly adopted severe restrictions to penal policy. The policy position of the rightwing opposition and its vehement and persistent criticism of the government provide an explanation, the article argues. Taking media coverage, public opinion, violence statistics, and the government's performance into account, the analysis shows that opposition criticism spurred the penal policy restrictions. Hence, by incorporating a policy agenda perspective, this article encourages a broadening of the perspective on parties’ policy influence. In particularly the opposition's opportunities to politicise issues and hereby influence policy.