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In this article, we examine the role of nongovernmental entities (NGEs; nonprofits, religious groups, and businesses) in disaster response and recovery. Although media reports and the existing scholarly literature focus heavily on the role of governments, NGEs provide critical services related to public safety and public health after disasters. NGEs are crucial because of their ability to quickly provide services, their flexibility, and their unique capacity to reach marginalized populations. To examine the role of NGEs, we surveyed 115 NGEs engaged in disaster response. We also conducted extensive field work, completing 44 hours of semistructured interviews with staff from NGEs and government agencies in postdisaster areas in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, Northern California, and Southern California. Finally, we compiled quantitative data on the distribution of nonprofit organizations. We found that, in addition to high levels of variation in NGE resources across counties, NGEs face serious coordination and service delivery problems. Federal funding for expanding the capacity of local Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster groups, we suggest, would help NGEs and government to coordinate response efforts and ensure that recoveries better address underlying social and economic vulnerabilities.

Although experience inside the halls of power afford lobbyists valuable political, policy and procedural skills that can improve the deliberative process, it also gives them privileged access to former employers that others do not have. Washington’s revolving door evokes legitimate ethical concerns, such as when former legislators resign their seats to take lucrative jobs representing the very industries they regulate. However, social scientists know surprisingly little about the revolving door beyond such sensational, albeit important, cases. To shed more light on the broader phenomenon, we systematically explore the revolving door on a large scale to answer a simple question: Do revolving door lobbyists represent different interests than conventional lobbyists? If, as revolving door proponents imply, these lobbyists work on behalf of organized interests solely for their specialized subject-matter expertise, then we would expect them to represent clienteles that are no different than conventional lobbyists. Alternatively, if they represent a wider variety of economic interests than conventional lobbyists then we assume they are hired more for their ability to get a foot in the door than to serve as policy expert adjuncts to government. Using evidence from original data on the professional biographies of roughly 1600 registered lobbyists – which we link to data from almost 50 000 quarterly Lobbying Disclosure Act reports – we expose a significant transparency loophole in the law. Because lobbyists are not required to continuously disclose their ‘covered official’ status – the statutory definition of revolving door – periodic lobbying disclosure reports effectively hide the revolving door from public scrutiny. Instead, we rely on our more comprehensive information on lobbyists’ connections to previous employers to more accurately measure the size and scope of Washington’s revolving door, and to investigate how these connections affect which interests they represent. We find that revolving door lobbyists have worked mostly in Congress, tend to work as contract lobbyists rather than in-house government-relations staff and are more likely to specialize in lobbying for appropriations earmarks. Then, after controlling for a variety of lobbying specializations, we show that former members of Congress are no more likely than other lobbyists to attract a more economically diverse set of clients than their conventional-lobbyist counterparts. However, congressional staffers who had worked their way up the organizational ladder on Capitol Hill do. We infer that well-connected congressional staffers who spin through the revolving door sell access to key decision makers in Congress, not their industry- or issue-specific technical or substantive expertise. Simply, the revolving door problem is not limited to a handful of headline-catching former legislators, is much bigger than the existing lobbying disclosure regime reveals and – most importantly – significantly distorts the representation of interests before government. The practical implications are clear: lobbying transparency rules, cooling-off periods and other restrictions are insufficient disincentives. Interest group demand for access is simply too strong. We advocate enhancing lobbying transparency by expanding the statutory definitions of lobbying activities, requiring lobbyists to disclose more details about government employment and shifting some of the disclosure burden to democratically accountable government officials themselves.

To what extent do political parties have an effect on the policy-related activity of interest groups? Drawing from ideas of conflict expansion and the structure of extended party networks, we argue that political parties are able to pull interest groups into more policy conflicts than they otherwise would be involved in. We posit that parties are able to draw interest groups to be active outside of established issue niches. We suggest that several mechanisms—shared partisan electoral incentives, reciprocity, identification with the means, and cue-taking behavior—lead groups to participate in more diverse political conflicts. By linking data on interest group bill positions and the policy content of legislation, we generate a novel measure of 158 interest groups' alignment with political parties. We find that the more an interest group is ideologically aligned with a political party, the more diverse their issue agenda becomes.

Using an organizational informatics approach, this study explores the implications of human rights organizations’ use of censorship circumvention technologies. Through qualitative analyses of data collected through in-depth interviews, the research examines the factors influencing the use of circumvention technologies and the organizational effects of their use. The outcomes include a revised model of censorship circumvention technology use as well as a new model situating human rights organizations and their audiences in bidirectional information flows. The research provides recommendations for practice as well as insight for organizational informatics and information systems security research in the areas of protective technologies, awareness, detection, and physical security.

Executive Summary In order to engage in public policy, interest groups need to survive and thrive as organizations. What factors shape perceptions of group entrepreneurs as to the future prospects for their groups’ survival? The careful and ambitious work of Gray and Lowery (and others working in the population ecology paradigm) has drawn attention to that fact that not all groups that are born survive. This observation raises the question: what leads groups to ‘feel’ anxiety about their organizational mortality? In their 1997 article, utilizing survey data on the organizational characteristics and situational dynamics of a sample of groups lobbying in several US states, Gray and Lowery asked just that question: what are the levels of ‘mortality anxiety’ among groups still alive? In this article, we revisit this question using similar data, but with some additional variables, and for a non-US case (namely, post-devolution Scottish public policy). In sorting out what factors are associated with anxiety, our analysis seeks to weigh up the existing ecological emphasis on broad shifts in population-level forces (that is, competition) with group-level variables reflecting adaptive changes (that is, identity, uniqueness, changes).

Although political scientists have increasingly focused on the role of gender in the policy process and the characteristics of individual lobbyists, little is known about the gender politics of the government relations profession. We extend the study of professional women to the unique political context of Washington, DC, lobbying, an important form of political participation that is understudied in terms of gender. Using data from more than 25,000 individuals registered to lobby the federal government from 2008 to 2015, we show that women account for 37% of the lobbyist population in Washington, that female lobbyists are more likely to work as in-house employees than for contract lobbying firms, and that the largest Washington lobbying firms are strongly biased towards employing men. We add to these findings qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 23 lobbyists to reveal how the professional experiences of women often depend on the idiosyncrasies of lobbying employment and the political nature of their work. We conclude that the underrepresentation of women in the professional lobbying community is an underappreciated problem with broader implications for gender equality in elite political participation.

The Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) will turn 25 years old on December 19, 2020. Between 1998 and 2018, organizations and lobbying firms filed more than one million reports. These reports provide information on the activity of 47,555 organizations, 6834 lobbying firms, and 47,479 individual lobbyists. The interest group scholarly community has put the LDA data to good use over the course of a quarter century of observation. Yet, lobbying disclosures have not been fully leveraged to generate new discoveries about the politics of interest groups, advocacy, legislative studies, and public policy. In this article, we provide an overview of the lobbying disclosure process by describing the idiosyncrasies of the data’s nested and complex structure and the limitations of what information is actually reported. We then assess recent research using LDA data, provide advice on completing research at different levels of analysis, document important changes in data reliability and structure over time, and introduce replication tools to support further research. As the time horizon of lobbying disclosure panel data continues to grow, the LDA—especially when combined with other sources—is an increasingly fruitful way to observe money in politics, legislative behavior, corporate political activity, political consulting, and individual lobbyists engaged in policy advocacy.

How many lobbyists are in Washington, and how common is it for them to have worked in the federal government? We assume that high-profile cases like former Senator Tom Daschle—the namesake of the so-called Daschle loophole to the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) in the USA—are not isolated. In this article, we systematically account for lobbying and policy advocacy in as large an empirical scope as possible to uncover the presence of ‘shadow lobbyists.’ Using a new data set of professional biographies of both registered lobbyists and unregistered policy advocates, we estimate that there are an equal number of paid professionals in a gray market for lobbying services. We also find that registered lobbyists are more likely to have previously worked in government and are more likely to specialize in legislative advocacy. Since policymaking at the American national level has increasingly shifted to federal agencies and to the states, our results indicate that the LDA and similar lobbying regulations may be becoming increasingly obsolete. The evidence we present indicates a growing divide between transparency laws and recent changes in the marketplace for policy advocacy.

Advocates for same-sex marriage have had much to celebrate. The last few years have shown that state after state and senator after senator have declared their support for full marriage equality. Such momentum suggests that their goals will be realized sooner rather than later. In this article, we analyze when senators announce their support for same-sex marriage. Contrary to the popularly held belief that their decisions will quickly snowball into filibuster-proof numbers, we find that most of the easy successes have already been achieved. The difficulty of securing the last few votes may take much longer.

For decades, political scientists have had two divergent views on lobbyists in Washington. On the one hand they focus on the privileged access of a few groups in balkanized issue niches, and on the other they observe highly inclusive lobbying campaigns where hundreds of lobbyists vigorously compete for policymakers’ attention. Not surprisingly, these disparate observations lead to contradictory conclusions about lobbying tactics, relations with relevant policymakers and the nature of interest group influence. In this article, we make a simple, yet novel, empirical observation: these seemingly incongruent observations of lobbying at the micro level are not inconsistent when we uncover the structure of lobbyists’ interactions at the macro level. That is, both views are correct, depending on the policy context. Using data from 248 543 Lobbying Disclosure Act reports filed between 1998 and 2008 – which consists of 1 557 526 observations of 32 700 individual lobbyists reporting activity in 78 issue areas – we reveal that the Washington lobbying community has a fundamental and stable core–periphery structure. We then document how the empirically derived core–periphery mapping is a superior way to differentiate bandwagon or niche policy domains. As transaction cost theory suggests, we find that policy domains in the core have more in-house lobbyists and more revolving door lobbyists. And, on average, lobbyists active in core domains represent a greater diversity of interests and tend to be policy generalists. The converse is also true. Highly specialized contract lobbyists drift toward those sparsely populated domains in the periphery where they may focus on obscure policy minutiae, relatively free from public scrutiny. Our findings have important implications for the study of lobbying and interest representation. In Washington, there are really two worlds of lobbying. The first world, where most lobbying attention is directed, is one in which we see a great deal of interconnectedness and interest diversity. The second world, home to an overwhelming majority of policy domains, cultivates niche lobbying and policy balkanization. That these two worlds exist simultaneously is precisely why observers fail to agree on what ‘typical’ or ‘average’ lobbying is. We believe that this is why the political science literature on interest groups have been contradictory for so long. The abstract core–periphery structure we uncover also has important practical implications for influence in Washington. At first glance, those highly competitive policy domains in the core appear to embody the pluralistic ideal. However, we show that these conditions give interest groups the incentive to hire revolving door lobbyists, who sell access to former employers – not highly specialized expertise – at a premium. Existing lobbying disclosure and revolving door regulations do little to level the playing field. Washington’s most powerful interests know they need to staff up with large numbers of former government officials if they want to stick out in the crowd. Indeed, it appears to be one of the most effective ways to find a seat at the center of the conversation.