Furnas, Alexander C., Timothy M. LaPira, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Lee Drutman, and Kevin Kosar. "More than Mere Access: An Experiment on Moneyed Interests, Information Provision, and Legislative Action in Congress." Political Research Quarterly (2022): https://doi.org/10.1177/2F10659129221098743
A growing body of research suggests that the legislative agenda in Congress favors the preferences and interests of wealthy Americans and well-organized corporations. But how do these groups influence legislative action? In this paper, we focus on the role of legislative staffers, developing a theory of information processing and judgment in which staffers weigh the costs of granting access to different constituents or interest groups against signaled informational and electoral benefits that those constituents or groups may offer. We then test this theory on an original, large-scale survey of more than 400 Washington, DC-based congressional staffers who participated in the 2017 Congressional Capacity Survey. Using a survey experiment vignette about a policy ask by an outside interest to staff, we manipulate the identity of the individual or interest making the request, the substantive nature of the request, and the information provided by the petitioner to the staffer. We then explore the effort that staffers would expend on the hypothetical request, whether (and how) they would use the information provided by the outside interest, and how they would update their beliefs about public opinion in their constituency on the basis of the information. Together, our results shed light on debates over the nature of substantive representation of constituent preferences, lobbying influence, and legislative behavior in Congress in an era of rising political polarization and inequality.
Furnas, Alexander C, Jesse M. Crosson and Geoffrey M. Lorenz (2021), "Pandemic Pluralism: Legislator Championing of Organized Interests in Response to COVID-19", Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy: Vol. 2: No. 1, pp 23-41. https://dx.doi.org/10.1561/113.00000028
The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a system-wide economic downturn disrupting virtually every conceivable economic interest. Which interests do legislators publicly champion during such crises? Here, we examine mentions of particular industries across thousands of press releases issued by members of Congress during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (January to June 2020). We show that members consistently emphasized interests significant to their constituency and party network, but less so their direct campaign contributors or ideological allies. This suggests that members believe that they must be seen as good district representatives and party stewards even when national crises could justifiably induce them to favor any number of interests.
Furnas, Alexander C. “Coalitions and coordination in Washington think tanks: board interlock among Washington D.C.-based policy research and planning organizations.” Appl Netw Sci 5, 83 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-020-00318-7
Think tanks have become central players in the political and policy ecosystem of the United States, yet the communication and coordination strategies and connections between them remain relatively unexamined. This paper begins to remedy that by using IRS 990 data to construct and analyze the largest board interlock network among policy planning organizations to date. An analysis of 277 policy research organizations located in Washington D.C. reveals high levels of resource seeking, issue-area coordination and weak evidence of ideological coordination among these substantively important organizations in American politics.
Crosson, Jesse M, Alexander C. Furnas, Tim M Lapira, and Casey Burgat. “Ideological Sabotage, Party Competition, and the Decline in Legislative Capacity in the US House.” Legislative Studies Quarterly. 2020. [working paper version]
Since the 1990s, members of the U.S. House have systematically shifted resources from legislative to non-legislative functions. We document this trend by tracking members’ expenditures on legislative staff and offer an explanation for declining investments, drawing upon insights from transaction-costs economic theory. Using an original dataset constructed from 236,000 quarterly payroll disbursements for 120,000 unique House staff between the 103rd and 113th Congresses, we show that members’ divestment in legislative capacity is symmetrical between and consistent within parties, contrary to expectations rooted in asymmetrical, ideological sabotage by conservative activists alone. Additionally, this divestment occurs within incumbent member-offices over time, accelerates when newly elected members of either party replace departing ones, and persists when the out-party takes over control of the chamber. We conclude that perpetual competition over institutional control and centralization of legislative functions motivates declining legislative capacity among members.
Crosson, Jesse M, Alexander C. Furnas, and Geoffrey M. Lorenz. “Polarized Pluralism Organizational Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System.” American Political Science Review 114, no. 4 (2020): 1117–37. doi:10.1017/S0003055420000350. [preprint][job talk slides 2020]
🥇 2019 Best Paper Award from the section on Political Organizations and Parties of the American Political Science Association.
For decades, critics of pluralism have argued that the American interest group system exhibits a significantly biased distribution of policy preferences. We evaluate this argument by measuring groups’ revealed preferences directly, developing a set of ideal point estimates, IGscores, for over 2,600 interest groups and 950 members of Congress on a common scale. We generate the scores by jointly scaling a large dataset of interest groups’ positions on congressional bills with roll-call votes on those same bills. Analyses of the scores uncover significant heterogeneity in the interest group system, with little conservative skew and notable inter-party differences in preference correspondence between legislators and ideologically similar groups. Conservative bias and homogeneity reappear, however, when weighting IGscores by groups’ campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. These findings suggest that bias among interest groups depends on the extent to which activities like contributions and lobbying influence policymakers’ perceptions about the preferences of organized interests.
Lorenz, Geoffrey M., Alexander C. Furnas, and Jesse M. Crosson. “Large-N Bill Positions Data from MapLight.org: What Can We Learn from Interest Groups’ Publicly Observable Legislative Positions?” Interest Groups & Advocacy 9, 342–360 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-020-00085-x [preprint]
The transparency organization MapLight records instances of organizations taking positions for and against legislation in Congress. The dataset comprises some 130,000 such positions taken on thousands of bills between the 109th and 115th Congresses (2005-2018). The depth and breadth of these data potentially give them wide applicability for answering questions about interest group behavior and influence as well as legislative politics more broadly. However, the coverage and content of the data are affected by aspects of MapLight's research process. This article introduces the MapLight dataset and its potential uses, examines issues related to sampling and other aspects of MapLight's research process, and explains how scholars can address these to make appropriate use of the data.
Furnas, Alexander C., Michael Heaney and Timothy LaPira. “The Partisan Ties of Lobbying Firms” Research & Politics. 2019. [Open Access Paper]
🥇 2018 Best Paper Award from the section on Political Organizations and Parties of the American Political Science Association.
🥉 Honorable Mention for the 2018 Best Paper Award from the Standing Group on Interest Groups of the European Consortium on Political Research (ECPR).
This article examines lobbying firms as intermediaries between organized interests and legislators in the United States. It states a partisan theory of legislative subsidy in which lobbying firms generate greater revenues when their clients believe that firms’ partisan ties are valued highly by members of Congress. It formulates hypotheses that lobbying firms that have partisan ties to the majority party receive greater revenues than do lobbying firms that do not have such ties, as well as that partisan ties with the House majority party lead to greater financial returns than do partisan ties to the Senate majority party. These hypotheses are tested using data available under the Lobbying Disclosure Act from 2008 to 2016. Panel regression analysis indicates that lobbying firms receive financial benefits when they have partisan ties with the majority party in the House but not necessarily with the Senate majority party, while controlling for firm-level covariates (number of clients, client diversity, and firm organizational characteristics). A difference-in-differences analysis establishes that Democratically aligned lobbying firms experienced financial losses when the Republican Party reclaimed the House in 2011, but there were no significant differences between Republican and Democratic firms when the Republicans reclaimed the Senate in 2015.
Furnas, Alexander C., Lee Drutman, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Kevin Kosar and Timothy LaPira. “The Congressional Capacity Survey: Some takeaways about who staff are, how they got there, what they do, and where they may go” In Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform, edited by Lee Drutman, Kevin Kosar and Timothy LaPira. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming 2020.
Edwards, Benjamin, Alexander Furnas, Stephanie Forrest, and Robert Axelrod. “Strategic aspects of cyberattack, attribution, and blame.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017): 201700442.
Cyber conflict is now a common and potentially dangerous occurrence. The target typically faces a strategic choice based on its ability to attribute the attack to a specific perpetrator and whether it has a viable punishment at its disposal. We present a game-theoretic model, in which the best strategic choice for the victim depends on the vulnerability of the attacker, the knowledge level of the victim, payoffs for different outcomes, and the beliefs of each player about their opponent. The resulting blame game allows analysis of four policy-relevant questions: the conditions under which peace (i.e., no attacks) is stable, when attacks should be tolerated, the consequences of asymmetric technical attribution capabilities, and when a mischievous third party or an accident can undermine peace. Numerous historical examples illustrate how the theory applies to cases of cyber or kinetic conflict involving the United States, Russia, China, Japan, North Korea, Estonia, Israel, Iran, and Syria.
Furnas, Alexander C. and Lee Drutman. “Descriptive Network Analysis: interest group lobbying dynamics around immigration policy.” In Government, Policy and Analytics, edited by Jennifer Bachner and Kathryn Wagner Hill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
This chapter provides an introduction to the use of network methods for descriptive and exploratory political analysis. We offer a general introduction to the kinds of data that can be represented and interrogated with network tools and then provide some introductory guidance on effectively using those tools. We also walk through an example of using these network methods on real-world political data by presenting an analysis of lobbying on immigration issues.
Furnas, Alexander C. “Procurement Disclosure in the Slovak Republic." In Civic Media Project, edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.