Data Visualization on Corporate Lobbying in the United States
In this post, I answer some basic questions on direct lobbying — the process by which lobbying firms influence legislative bodies in the United States.
I coded all of these visualizations in R. This is part of a larger project on corporate lobbying for POL478 — Data Visualization for Political Scientists taught by Professor Micheal Donnelly at the University of Toronto.
The data is from LobbyView, an open-source platform that codes corporate lobbying reports into readable data formats. I will be visualizing data from quarterly report findings conducted between 1999 — Q2 of 2020. Each report provides us with information on the firm doing the lobbying, the client they’re lobbying for (if applicable), and the amount they lobbied for.
How many reports are filed each year?
According to the lobbying disclosure act of 1995, registered firms must report their lobbying activity to the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Secretary of the U.S. Senate. By looking at the number of reports filed each year, we can gain some insight into the change in corporate lobbying activity over time.
Interestingly, from 2007–2008, the number of lobbying reports increased from 48,078 to 81,075 in 2008. The data for 2020 only goes up to quarter 2, so disregard the drop from 2019–2020.
How much do firms spend?
To be frank, firms spend billions of dollars on their lobbying efforts.
According to the data, lobbying expenditures increased steadily from 2000 to 2010. Then, it remained at steady levels from 2010 to 2019.
Who’s spent the most?
The Chamber of Commerce has spent over $1 billion dollars in lobbying expenditures from 1999–Q2 2020.
What firm has the most clients?
Companies hire firms and individuals to do lobbying on their behalf. In these lobbying reports, they must specify their “client” i.e. the entity they’re lobbying for.
According to the figure, Van Scoyoc Associates has the highest client list over the 20-year period. They’ve also spent approximately $0.60 billion in their lobbying efforts (see the previous figure).
Do firms with more clients spend more?
Is there a relationship between a firm's client list and its total expenditure? In theory, we’d expect firms with more clients to spend more lobbying on behalf of their clients. I use a scatterplot to visualize this relationship.
Each dot on the scatter plot represents a firm. The y-axis measures how much they’ve spent over the 20 years. The x-axis measures the number of clients.
According to the loess line, the relationship between the number of clients and lobbying expenditure is relevant for certain firms that exceed a client list of 5000. However, there are a high number of outliers to this relationship. For example, the United States Chamber of Commerce spends a lot of money (1.20 billion) but ultimately lobbies only for themselves (client = 1) as a business organization representing the needs of more than 3 million businesses and organizations.
Conclusion
Lobbying in the United States is the primary way in which businesses influence the political realm. Direct lobbying is one of the only ways in which people are provided with a sliver of insight into the activity of corporations to influence the political agenda. From the visualizations, we can see that this is a billion-dollar business involving a high number of clients and firms.
This report does not provide a total analysis of all of the lobbying efforts conducted by firms or individuals in the United States. There are other forms of lobbying like political donations or indirect influence that lack sophisticated methods of being tracked. Therefore, making it that much more important that methods of direct lobbying be made transparent to the public.
