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 that bring specific forms of expertise and distinct networks. Our key findings about how regulatory lobbying differs include the following: (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 unregistered regulatory advocates working on the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act plausibly exceeds 150% of the registered lobbyists 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 a theoretical discussion to situate and contextualize these findings. Collectively, this work opens a window into neglected domains of politics and reveals an important and understudied form of political inequality.

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the need to examine public trust in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine approval process and the role of political influence in the FDA’s decisions. Ensuring that the FDA is itself trustworthy is important for justifying public trust in its actions, like vaccine approvals, thereby promoting public health. We propose five conditions of trustworthiness that the FDA should meet when it reviews vaccines, even during emergencies: consistency with rules, proper expert or political decision-makers, proper decision-making and noninterference, connection to public preference, and transparency of both reasons and procedures. The five conditions provide a roadmap of procedural and substantive requirements, which the FDA has variably implemented, focused on ensuring appropriate influence of political interests. While being a trustworthy agency cannot guarantee the public’s trust, implementing these conditions build a groundwork for public trust.

How can historical perspective be brought to the quantitative social sciences? The question has proven immensely popular, but answers that deal squarely with historical context and narrative remain elusive. An important recent book by Gregory Wawro and Ira Katznelson—Time Counts—provides an important new direction and a kit of useable tools. Using Wawro and Katznelson's approach and methods puts social scientists in a better position to appreciate the historicity of their data and to avoid common errors in statistical execution and inference. Time Counts also raises questions every bit as vital as those it answers, especially when it comes to the boundaries between narrative and quantitative work. An important concern is that inference from a particular historical setting (or what I call a “regime”) cannot be reduced to a special case of inference from large-sample statistics. Historical judgment is at least partially incommensurable with the idea of probability, cases are often important precisely because they are not countable, and scientific rigor may demand avoiding quantification for part of the social scientist's approach.

The study of agenda setting has become curiously disconnected from democratic theory and democratization. Following Schattschneider, Dahl, and recent developments in political theory, I call for its reintegration in theoretical and empirical realms. The concept of agenda democracy allows for better understanding of contests over institutions, significant historical-institutional transformations, the study of inequality and its mechanisms of generation and maintenance, and the building and undermining of democracy. Agenda democracy requires a broad understanding of agendas (beyond a mere menu of final policy choices), recognizes that many democratic regimes have institutions that systematically render agendas nondemocratic, and compels us to look at the interstices of institutions and society (party transformation, petition and grievance mechanisms, advocacy campaigns, initiatives to expand what I call the shortlist of the possible) for moments of significant change. Agenda democracy compels the examination of democratizing agenda restrictions, the study of conservative organizations in politics, and the consideration of decomposing the term “movement.”

Committee formation in early American legislatures happened when those assemblies were inundated with petitions, a relationship unexamined in institutional political science. We develop a model where a floor creates committees to respond to topic-specific petitions, predicting committee creation when petitions (1) are topically specific, (2) are spread across constituencies, and (3) have complex subject matter, and predicting committee appointments from petition-heavy constituencies. Analysis of case studies and with two original datasets – petitions sent to the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1766 to 1769, and over 100,000 petitions sent to Congress and recorded in the House Journal (1789-1875) – shows petitions, their complexity and their geographic dispersion predict committee creation. Our theoretical argument embeds asset specificity in legislative institutions, and helps reinterpret the entropy of political agendas and the origins of standing committees in American legislatures.

For much of American political history, the electoral franchise was restricted to only a portion of the population. By contrast, the right to petition was considered universal and enshrined in the First Amendment, giving voice to the voteless. Petitioning thus served as a fundamental mechanism of representation. Still, fundamental questions remain: How was petitioning used, how did Congress respond to petitions, and did the petition allow for partial representation of the marginalized and unenfranchised? We address these questions by analyzing the Congressional Petitions Database (CPD), an original endeavor tracking virtually every petition introduced to Congress from 1789 to 1949. Our analyses document how (1) two important groups of unenfranchised constituents—Native Americans and women—petitioned regularly and (2) Congress's initial treatment of Natives' and women's petitions was similar to that of all others, thus offering systematic evidence highlighting the petition's role as a mechanism for representation among otherwise unenfranchised groups.

We introduce the Congressional Petitions Database (CPD), an original endeavor tracking virtually
every petition introduced to Congress from 1789 to 1949. Exploiting Congress’s ritual reading of
petition prayers, we leverage a supervised machine learning algorithm to create a database comprising
over 537,000 petitions. For each petition we code the prayer and its subject matter, geographic origin,
initial disposition and other information. Initial analyses suggest that (1) per-capita petitioning peaked
nationwide in the mid- and late-nineteenth century and remained at higher levels until World War I,
declining appreciably thereafter; (2) the South exhibits lower petitioning from 1802 to 1870 (but not
before 1800), cratering in the 1840s through 1860s and again later in the Jim Crow Era; and (3) the
unenfranchised petitioned regularly and their petitions were afforded process similar to all others. The
CPD will be useful for studies of legislative development, social movements, interest group advocacy, federalism and sectionalism.