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I explore the potential impact of rulemakers' professional experience on the efficiency of rulemaking by U.S. federal agencies. I highlight two types of professional experience rulemakers may have—inside experience gathered by working in the federal government, if not the same agency, and outside experience gained before entering the civil service or between stints in government. I discuss several plausible mechanisms through which inside and outside experience may affect rulemaking efficiency. Using data combining rulemakers' career backgrounds with rulemaking life-cycles from 1999 to 2023, I show that outside experience, and not inside experience, is associated with two measures of rulemaking efficiency: a higher likelihood for proposed rules to be promulgated as final and a lower likelihood of unanticipated events—extensions of public comment periods, other delays to the rulemaking timetable, and the withdrawal of rules already issued.

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.

We examine the role of former clerks to Supreme Court justices on the Court's agenda setting process. We find that when a former clerk is the attorney on either a cert petition or an amicus brief, the Court is more likely to hear a case, compared to advocacy by a non-former clerk. To help explain these patterns, we draw on the broader literature on "revolving door" politics. We argue that the most plausible mechanisms are either that former clerks are more effective advocates or that their presence in a case signals its importance to the Court. Alternatively, former clerks may select into cases that the Court is likely to grant. While we cannot definitively disentangle these competing mechanisms, the strong patterns in the data suggest that the importance of the revolving door in judicial politics extends broadly into the domain of agenda setting and is thus worthy of further investigation.

AbstractDonald Trump's rhetoric, character, actions, and policy agenda have regularly posed strategic dilemmas for congressional Republicans. While Trump and much of his agenda are broadly unpopular, he has continued to enjoy strong support from the Republican voters who form their core electoral support. In this article, we analyze congressional Republicans' responses to several of Trump's most widely reported and controversial actions and comments as well as his legislative agenda. We find that congressional Republicans' personal and legislative positions on Trump reflected their electoral circumstances, their prior reactions to Trump during the campaign, and their ideological leanings. We also consider the positions adopted by congressional Democrats, who faced a more conventional problem of adapting to the president's level of local support.

Donald Trump's nomination posed a challenge for Republican congressional candidates running on the ticket with him in 2016. The nominee's intense base of support within the party combined with his unprecedented unpopularity more broadly required these candidates to think strategically about supporting or opposing him. This article examines how they responded to that challenge, what explains their different responses, and what electoral consequences ensued from their choices. The data show that candidates' positions on Trump primarily reflected the partisanship of their districts and secondarily their gender and incumbency status. Their strategic choices had little general impact in an election almost completely dominated by partisanship, but in at least a few instances refusal to support Trump may have been necessary for the Republican incumbent to win reelection.

AbstractTo lobby legislators, it is important for interest groups to signal their ability to help legislators win elections and provide them with policy-relevant information. We explore for-profit companies' use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports as a signaling device to promote their reputation to legislators and convey their ability to provide electoral and policymaking support, which is valuable for lobbying. To this end, we create a panel dataset by combining ESG reports issued by US companies and the same companies' lobbying and campaign contribution records from 1999 to 2017. We expect companies to issue more ESG reports, as well as reports containing more quantitative content, when they lobby. The data conform to our expectations. We also reason that lobbying may be more strongly related to ESG reporting when it is coupled with campaign contributions made by affiliated corporate political action committees, but the data do not support this expectation.

AbstractThis article introduces two newly available sources of data on presidents' legislative programs. The first consists of administration legislative initiatives cleared by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for submission to Congress. We refer to these records as "OMB logs" because they record OMB's clearance actions on executive‐branch legislative proposals. The second consists of memoranda, officially called Statements of Administration Policy, that OMB sends to floor leaders detailing the president's position on legislation pending floor consideration. We compare these new data on presidents' legislative initiatives and policy preferences with those contained in currently available sources—The Public Papers of the Presidents and Congressional Quarterly's scoring of presidential positions on roll‐call votes—and with a long available but seldom used fifth source, the Congressional Record. Both new data sources list bills and legislative preferences that are not included in the currently available sources. We illustrate the value of these new data by calculating presidents' impressive "legislative effectiveness" in the House when all presidential initiatives are taken into account.