For lobbyists, success is about who you know rather than what you know. Forming and maintaining relationships with legislators is key to public policy success for interest groups and lobbyists. In this paper, I examine how to operationalize the relationship between a legislator and a lobbyist. Disclosure forms on gifts may be a way to operationalize the relationships between legislators and lob...

Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research—that...

BACKGROUND This paper investigates whether state legislators find testimony influential, to what extent testimony influences policy-makers' decisions, and defines the features of testimony important in affecting policy-makers' decisions. METHODS We used a mixed method approach to analyze responses from 862 state-level legislators in the United States (U.S.). Data were collected via a phone su...

Why do legislators sometimes engage in behavior that deviates from the expressed policy preferences of constituents who participate in politics at high rates? We examine this puzzle in the context of Democratic legislators' representation of their senior citizen constituents on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA). We find that legislators' roll-call votes on the ACA did...