Replication Data for: Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance

Administrative agencies have undertaken an increasingly substantial role in policymaking. Yet the influence-seeking that targets these agencies remains poorly understood. Reporting exceptions under the Lobbying Disclosure Act allow many of the most powerful advocates to characterize their activity as lawyering, not lobbying, and thereby fly under the radar. Using agency-generated records on lobbying activity, financial reporting, and personnel databases specific to lawyers, as well as LinkedIn, we describe a vast subterranean world of regulatory influence-seeking that the social science literature has (mostly) ignored. Regulatory lobbying is systematically different from legislative lobbying. It involves different kinds of people and different lobbying firms, who bring particular forms of expertise and distinct networks. Some of our key findings about how regulatory lobbying differs include: (1) the regulatory lobbying sector is highly segregated from the reported lobbying sector, with many regulatory advocates failing to consistently register or report earnings commensurate with their activity level, (2) the number of non-registered regulatory advocates working on the implementation of a statute plausibly exceeds 150 percent of the registered lobbying population working on that law, (3) the most effective regulatory lobbyists and law firms involved with regulatory lobbying have incomes that dramatically outpace leading reported lobbying firms (which are also mostly law firms), and (4) back-of-the-envelope calculations and more sophisticated decomposition regressions imply that aggregate expenditure on lawyer-lobbying is several multiples of reported lobbying spending. We introduce the case of a particular lawyer-lobbyist and provide theoretical discussion to situate and contextualize these findings. Collectively, this work opens a window into neglected domains of politics and reveals an important understudied form of political inequality.行政机构在政策制定中发挥的作用日益凸显，但针对此类机构的影响力游说活动仍未得到充分研究。根据《游说披露法案（Lobbying Disclosure Act）》中的报告豁免条款，众多顶尖游说者可将自身活动标榜为法律服务而非游说活动，借此规避监管关注。本研究借助行政机构生成的游说活动记录、财务报告数据、律师专属人事数据库以及领英（LinkedIn）平台数据，刻画了一个规模庞大、却被社会科学文献（大体上）忽略的监管游说（regulatory lobbying）地下网络。监管游说与立法游说（legislative lobbying）存在系统性差异：二者涉及的从业者与游说事务所类型各不相同，从业者所具备的专业技能与所依托的人脉网络也各具特色。本研究关于监管游说差异化特征的核心发现包括：其一，监管游说行业与已披露的游说行业存在高度隔离，众多监管游说从业者未按其活动规模持续进行注册或申报相应收入；其二，就某一法规的实施工作而言，未注册的监管游说从业者数量，合理估算已超过该法规相关注册游说者人数的150%；其三，参与监管游说的顶尖游说者与律师事务所，其收入远超行业头部的已披露游说事务所（这类事务所大多也为律师事务所）；其四，通过粗略估算与更精细的分解回归分析可知，律师游说的总支出规模是已披露游说支出的数倍。本研究还介绍了一位律师游说者的具体案例，并开展理论探讨，以阐明上述研究发现的背景与语境。综上，本研究为洞察被忽视的政治领域打开了一扇窗口，同时揭示了一种长期未得到充分研究的重要政治不平等现象。