Bureaucratic Revolving Doors and Interest Group Participation in Policymaking
Please arrive 5 minutes before event begins.
There is growing concern about the movement of individuals from private sectors to bureaucracies, yet little attention is paid to how this affects interest groups’ activities. Interest groups with connections to bureaucrats may exert less effort to provide information to policymakers (the “substitution effect”) or exert more effort (the “complement effect”). We address this question by constructing a novel dataset on career trajectories of bureaucrats in the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) and firms that served on USTR advisory committees during the period 1997-2017. Empirical results support the substitution effect: firms with connections to USTR bureaucrats decrease their lobbying spending and participation on advisory committees. We present suggestive evidence that the substitution effect occurs when connected bureaucrats’ ideologies are closer to the median ideal point of the agency, which makes the connected bureaucrats pivotal players. Our findings suggest that an apparent decrease in interest groups’ political activities might not imply that their influence on policymaking diminished.
Date: 23 October 2020, 12:30 (Friday, 2nd week, Michaelmas 2020)
Venue: Colloquium to be hosted on Zoom
Speaker: Hye Young You (New York University)
Organising department: Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR)
Organisers: Petra Schleiter (DPIR), Nelson Ruiz (University of Oxford)
Part of: Politics Research Colloquium
Booking required?: Not required
Booking email: events@politics.ox.ac.uk
Audience: This colloquium is usually a closed event to members of Oxford, but this Michaelmas Term, we are delighted to be able to open this event up to 20 external attendees. Please email events@politics.ox.ac.uk to book your place using your official University email address. Places will be allocated on a first-come, first-serve basis. (If you are a member of Oxford, email us, and you can be added to the Politics Research Colloquium mailing list, you do not need to book your place and joining details will be emailed to you)
Editor: Hannah Vinten