Television Issue Advertising and Legislative Strategy:
The Inside Ends of Outside Lobbying
Richard L. Hall and Molly E. Reynolds
University of Michigan
Abstract
Television issue advertising has grown dramatically in recent years, but we know very little
about its deployment and distribution in legislative advocacy. This paper begins to fill the gap,
examining where, when, and why interest groups run television issue advertisements beyond the
Washington Beltway. We begin from the premise that issue advertising is a form of outside
lobbying, but we recast the legislative ends that outside lobbying serves. We hypothesize that group
strategists will target areas represented by legislative allies it wants to mobilize more than undecided
members it wants to convert, especially allies on the committee(s) of jurisdiction. Only when a close
roll call is approaching will issue ads shift toward members near the legislative pivot. Our statistical
tests use state-group data on television issue ads concerning the 2003 Medicare prescription drug
bill. The analysis provides consistent support for the first two hypotheses and mixed support for
the third.
Paper prepared for delivery at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association,
Washington, DC, September 2010. All rights reserved by the authors. Thanks are due to Richard
Anderson Ken Goldstein, and Ken Kollman for insightful comments, Katie Drake and Richard
Anderson for exceptional research assistance, the Wisconsin Advertising Project for the data, and
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Gerald R. Ford
School of Public Policy for financial Support
As the first anniversary of his election drew near, President Bill Clinton seemed poised to
succeed on the most ambitious domestic policy initiative in a quarter century, Congress and the
American public on his side. The bill was the administration’s proposal for national health care
reform. A year later it lay dead on a Democratic Congress’s floor. A multitude of reasons have
been given for this outcome, but prominent in the immediate post-mortems were the advertising
campaigns of opposition groups. “Harry and Louise” had become household names representing
the allegedly high costs of the Clinton plan and the allegedly serious limits it would place on
individual choice. Journalists and politicians at the time asserted that the insurance industry’s
campaign killed health care reform. We now know that those claims were overstated (Jacobs and
Shapiro 1994, 2000), but the idea that “Harry and Louise” subverted reform by manipulating a
gullible public underlined important questions about the changing practice of American democracy.
Four presidential terms later, such worries have hardly abated. Quite the reverse. Issue
advertising has grown dramatically as an instrument of interest group advocacy, enlarging the already
substantial role that money plays in American politics. One estimate put spending on issue
advertisements in the 108th Congress in the DC media market alone at over $400 million dollars
(Falk, Grizard, and McDonald 2005). Back on the agenda in 2009, health care reform generated
issue advertising that saturated the airwaves, including ads by the original Harry and Louise (this
time playing pro-reform roles). Other areas, such as energy, environmental, and economic policy
have generated major advertising campaigns as well. In Obama’s first 100 days, $91 million was
spent on political issue advertising, over ten times what was spent in the first 100 days of George W.
Bush’s presidency (TNSMI/CMAG (2009. While no precise data are available, interest groups easily
spent more on issue-related advertising during 2009-10 than they gave in campaign contributions to
all candidates in the midterm congressional elections of 2009-2010 combined.
1
However conspicuous its growth, issue advertising has generated little systematic research.
The literature on PACs, for instance, is vast, spanning half a dozen disciplines with publications on
the subject in dozens of journals. Research on inside lobbying likewise has a long tradition, and the
last two decades have produced a literature rich in quantity and theoretical quality (see Baumgartner
et al. 2009; Grossman and Helpman 2001; Wright 1996). By comparison, the research on the issue
advertising is limited to a few topics. Numerous studies have examined the effects of issue
advertising on public opinion (e.g., Groenendyk and Valentino 2002; Jamieson 2000; Valentino,
Hutchings, and Williams 2004), and several have examined issue advertising inside the Washington
beltway (Falk 2003; Falk, Grizard, and McDonald 2006; Sexton and Loomis 1994). Bergan (2009)
examines the causal effects of grassroots appeals on legislative behavior with an ingenious
experimental design (2009), but it focuses on email campaigns to activists, not mass-based
advertising, and it does not speak to matters of targeting. In short, research on the use of targeted
advertising as an outside strategy has barely begun, a decade and a half after the original Harry and
Louise receded into our television screens.1
This paper begins to fill that gap, examining where, when, and why interest groups target
their television issue advertising. Empirically, we focus on televised issue advertisements
conventionally misnamed “pure” rather than “sham;” that is, the object of their attention is
legislation, not elections.2 Theoretically, we build from two simple premises, first, that issue
advertising is a particular form of “outside” lobbying (Jamieson 2000; Goldstein 1998) and, second,
that outside lobbying is an instrument for achieving inside, legislative ends (Hansen 1991; Kollman
1998; Goldstein 1999). To understand strategies on the outside, in other words, we need a theory of
lobbying on the inside. What are the proximate political objectives that govern a group’s inside
lobbying? How do group strategists map those inside objectives into outside strategies? With
respect to issue advertising, more specifically, at whom will groups target their advertising buys,
2
given that their immediate legislative objectives can change as a bill moves through a multi-stage
legislative process?
In addressing these questions, we begin from the premise that issue advertising is a form of
outside lobbying, but we recast the inside ends that outside lobbying serves. Inside lobbying to win
over wavering members is less common than subsidizing those who already agree with the group.
Issue advertising promotes the same purpose but through different means. By making an issue
more salient to the constituents of a legislative ally, advertising gives her greater incentive to actively
pursue the group’s objectives in Washington even as her mind is more focused on attentive citizens
back home. When a roll call is forthcoming and likely to be close, issue ads will shift toward
members near the legislative pivot, as Krehbiel (1991) defines the term, who are also the members
most likely to be undecided.. We evaluate these hypotheses along side their alternatives in head-tohead tests, using state-level data on televised advertisements concerning the Medicare Prescription
Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (hereafter, MMA), one of the most important
domestic programs of the George W. Bush presidency. The analysis supports our main claims. It
also provides systematic confirmation of core hypotheses developed in the general literature on
outside lobbying. We conclude by emphasizing the growing importance of issue advertising in
legislative advocacy and identify a few of the questions that should motivate further research.
The Inside Ends of Outside Lobbying
Any theory of issue advertising must answer two questions that interest group strategists
must confront: What ends will it serve? And through what mechanisms does it to work?
Our analysis begins from the premise that outside lobbying is a means to a group’s legislative
ends (see esp. Hansen 1991; Kollman 1998; Goldstein 1999, 75-78).3 A theory of outside advertising
thus requires a theory of inside lobbying. The literature on inside lobbying, in turn, emphasizes two
different assumptions whose implications only partly overlap. The most prominent view holds that
3
lobbying is primarily about changing legislators’ preferences over policies, specifically, to win the
votes of undecided legislators (e.g., Rothenberg 1992; Austen-Smith and Wright 1994; Wright 1996).
Lobbying resources, whether financial or informational, will be deployed to this purpose.
A second view holds that lobbying is more about influencing legislators’ participation than
their issue positions; in most circumstances, the inside lobbyist seeks to mobilize existing legislative
allies, not create new ones. Matthews long ago (1960) labeled this mechanism “backstopping.”
Ainsworth (1997) suggests that “lobbying enterprises” now serve this purpose. Hall and Deardorff
(2006) argue that inside lobbying “subsidizes” the information and labor costs of legislative allies,
helping them make progress on policies important to both member and group.
Kollman’s (1998) and Goldstein’s (1999) accounts of outside lobbying rely primarily on the
first view of inside lobbying. In mounting outside lobbying efforts, Kollman argues, interest groups
“use precious resources... to convince policymakers to change their minds about something” (1998,
59). This process works simultaneously through two constituency-centered mechanisms that
Kollman (1998) identifies and Goldstein (1999) confirms: signaling the direction and salience of
constituency opinion and expanding the scope of conflict by increasing that salience. Information
about direction affects the legislator’s perceptions about whether her positions are out of step with
her constituents. Information about salience affects legislator expectations about the weight that
constituents will give her issue position when voting in the next election (Kollman, 1998 68-72;
Goldstein 1999, 42-51). By generating mail and other constituency contacts, grassroots campaigns
affect those weights, altering the calculations of legislators about the connections between the
policies they support and their probability of reelection. Thus does Kollman argue that significant
outside activity can “make an offending policymaker uncomfortable in the next election” (1998, 22).
Kollman’s study focuses mainly on which groups will outside lobby, however, not the
members they will target once they do. Nonetheless, his theory has implications regarding the
4
member-specific targeting of issue advertising. Assuming that popularity and salience vary by
geography as well as by issue, two hypotheses follow: Groups will concentrate their advertising in
states and districts (i) where the issue of interest is (or can be made to be) salient, and (ii) where their
position on the issue is (latently) popular.
That outside lobbying is intended to induce wavering members to support the group’s
position is more explicit in Goldstein: “Grass roots communications signal a legislator that a
particular issue is on the radar screen and that constituents are paying attention to his or her action,”
he argues, adding that such communications reduce the uncertainty regarding how the legislator’s
actions could be used against her in the next election (1999, 39). The legislative decisions at issue,
Goldstein states, are the positions that legislators take. To be good targets, they need to be
“persuadable,” their votes thus changeable. “With grassroots tactics being used in pursuit of a
legislative objective, it is the middle that matters,” he summarizes, “Lobbyists should target
undecided legislators” (46).
We extend Kollman (1998) and Goldstein (1999) to incorporate the second view of inside
lobbying’s objectives, identified above, and trace the implications of that view for outside
advertising. Outside lobbying is an instrument for influencing legislators’ constituency-induced
preferences, inherently so in our view, but the outside mechanisms that Kollman and Goldstein
identify can serve more than one behavioral end.
Most useful for present purposes is Hall and Deardorff’s model of lobbying as legislative
subsidy (2006). Hall and Deardorff harken back to Milbrath’s characterization of lobbyists as
“adjuncts to staff” (1963; see also Bauer, Pool, and Dexter 1963; Dexter 1969), but they use it to
generate different, less dismissive implications. Lobbyists provide legislatively useable policy
information, political intelligence, and staff support to legislative allies, enabling them to make
greater progress toward a policy objective they share with the group.4 Hall and Deardorff mention
5
outside lobbying only briefly, however. Where they do, they note that outside lobbying highlights an
important limitation of their model. Lobbying as subsidy is an inside mechanism that gives
legislators greater capacity to advance a policy objective important to both them and the group. In
their terms, it shifts the member’s budget line out but leaves her willingness-to-pay unchanged
(2006, 78, Figure 4). Outside lobbying can complement this strategy, but it works through a
different mechanism. By altering the member’s perception of an issue’s salience, the interest group
alters the expected value of the effort she gives it. It leaves the member’s legislative budget
unchanged, but it shifts the member’s indifference curve down the budget line, increasing the share
of legislative resources that the member invests in promoting the policy objective she shares with
the group (2006, Figure 3). If issue ads increase constituent mail, in other words, that mail should
enhance the willingness of the group’s legislative allies to advertise their position and increase their
issue attention, making themselves more visible and their credit-claiming back home more credible
(see Sulkin 2004). Importantly, Kollman emphasizes that outside lobbying can alter member
perceptions either by inducing constituents to contact their representatives or by signaling the
legislator that the group is able and willing to do so..5
For reasons implied above, furthermore, the group strategist bent on persuading wavering or
undecided members may think TV issue advertising an instrument with significant downside risks.
Convinced that a policy is good for their constituents, Kollman observes, legislators may blame
outside lobbyists for manipulating their constituents (1998, 23-24). If, contrary to its aspirations, an
ad campaign incites no strong reaction, that too may hurt the interest group’s cause. “Policymakers
are most impressed,” Kollman argues, “by large-scale grassroots activities spawned by low-cost
interest group mobilizations” (1998, 104, see also 74-76). High cost outside lobbying that spawns
low-scale grassroots activities, in turn, promises the opposite. The risk in using television advertising
– as opposed to, say, direct mail or “robocalls” – is that its costs are both substantial and visible.
6
District staff should be able to estimate the approximate frequency of broadcast spots aired in the
district. The member’s press operation or political consultant may monitor that advertising
systematically. In either case, if a meager constituency reaction follows a costly advertising
campaign, the member will infer the opposite of what the group wanted: Either the issue is nonsalient or the group’s position is non-popular, or both. Updating her perceptions of constituency
pressure, the member thinks it less necessary to please or appease the group than she did before the
advertising campaign.6
Hall and Deardorff also suggest that outside lobbying in the districts of opponents might
diminish their willingness to invest time and effort fighting this fight. Visibility in the presence of
constituency counter-pressure should earn members not credit; it should induce them to anticipate
blame. Blame-avoidance, in effect, “demobilizes” an opponent. In fact, we think a demobilization
strategy plausible theoretically but improbable empirically. The main reason is that the conditions
that make outside lobbying effective – potential salience and support for the group’s position –
make it less likely that a member will oppose the group ex ante.7 Even if a member’s personal
beliefs or, say, pressure from party leaders lead her to lean against her own constituency, she will
look to find “political cover,” not the visibility that comes with legislative activity (Kollman 145147). Insofar as the opponent is disinclined to be active on the inside ex ante, the group need not
spend outside resources on “deactivation.”
Finally, we reconsider Goldstein’s argument about the importance of electoral vulnerability
in choosing legislative targets who are “persuadable.” We expand that reasoning: Whether the
inside lobbyist intends to mobilize or persuade, vulnerable legislators should act as reelection
maximizers (or loss minimizers). The more electorally vulnerable they feel, the more responsive to
constituency contacts they should appear. Issue advertising can serve either purpose.
7
Issue Advertising in Legislative Stages
If outside lobbying is driven by inside ends, outside targets should change as inside
objectives change (Kollman 1999, 105-111; Goldstein 1999). At most stages of the legislative
process, however, members in the chamber middle are not the inside lobbyist’s immediate concern.
In the period prior to a committee report, actions taken to push a bill onto the agenda (or keep it
off) and negotiating its provisions behind-the-scenes are especially important (Arnold 1990). Unlike
formal voting, however, participation in such activities is highly selective (Mayhew 1974; Hall 1996).
Inside lobbyists should want their legislative allies using their time, political capital, and procedural
legerdemain moving the bill forward (or, for those opposed, obstructing it). Goldstein underscores
this point, arguing that outside strategies should “aim to influence influential legislators,” especially
at the committee stage (47) but also committee leaders and potential cue-givers at the floor stage
(48-49). Interest groups want leaders and cue givers to be on their side, but these individuals, we
would note, are also likely to have well-formed preferences. Thus does Goldstein argue elsewhere
that “legislators with a long public record in favor of a certain piece of legislation… will be
minimally influenced by communications in opposition to or support of an issue” (46-47). That is
true only insofar as legislators’ positions are the object of influence, not their participation in
drafting, bargaining, amending, or coalition-building. Legislators with a long public record in favor
of the group’s position are the very ones that a group should most want to mobilize. Even so, close
votes can occur in committee, such that wavering committee members might attract interest group
pressure from the outside. This is precisely what Goldstein finds.
As a bill moves closer to the floor and the moment of collective choice approaches, the
preferences of members in the middle loom larger to legislative leaders attempting to move the
legislation (Arnold 1990). So should they loom larger to interest group lobbyists and hence change
the group’s advertising targets, at least when the forthcoming votes are likely to be close. Insofar as
8
well-timed advertising by interest groups provides constituency information to their inside lobbyist,
it can help him pull unsupportive members over to the interest group’s side (Austen-Smith and
Wright 1994, 29)
In the MMA case, it became clear early in the process that close votes would occur on the
floor in both chambers. Pro-bill leaders in the Senate had to fend off scores of amendments during
mid-summer floor consideration, and they had to muster super-majorities to consider both the
original bill and the conference report. On the House side, the floor votes at both stages could not
have been closer; indeed, the final vote in November would be kept open for three hours because
the bill managers fell one vote short. In sum, this case should provide a relatively difficult test of
our hypothesis that issue advertising is more often a strategy for mobilizing allies than pressuring
members in the middle, but it also allows us to test for the stage-specific importance of the latter.
Issue Advertising Data: Targets and Media Markets
To assess the questions about advertising we have presented here, we need data on the
frequency and type of ads run in our case of interest. The Wisconsin Advertising Project data on
issue advertising are suitable for this purpose in several respects. For the congress under study here
(the 108th), the Wisconsin Project catalogued political television ads in the top 100 media markets,
with codes for sponsor, content, incidence, date, station, and media market. We screened the
advertisement scripts for all issue ads, January through November 2003, that mentioned Medicare or
prescription drugs.8 Five groups ran advertising campaigns related to the bill: AARP, Alliance for
Retired Americans (ARA), Alliance to Improve Medicare (AIM), Pfizer, and United Seniors
Association (USA). Three of the five supported the bill. The AARP opposed it until very late in the
process, with the ARA being the only one to consistently oppose it.9
Most ads in the MMA dataset are “generic,” that is, they do not target a particular member
by name. Generic ads direct viewers to “Tell Congress...” or “send them a message.” Most ads
9
help viewers do that, either by directing them to a toll-free number, which typically patches the caller
through to one of their representatives’ offices, or directing them to the group’s website, which
guides them to their members’ email addresses. One group, the USA, ran ads that targeted
particular legislators by name, but we determined that only the chamber code, not the specific
member’s name, was reliable as an indicator of the advertising target. We thus have for one group
data on the ads that it ran regarding House members or senators, but the House-specific data are not
district-specific. The ability to distinguish House-focused and Senate-focused ads does permit a
more fined-grained analysis of the USA’s targeting strategies, however, which we will use to
supplement the main analysis.
For all ads, then, the major measurement problem was how to map the geography of
broadcast advertising, defined by media market (DMA) boundaries, into congressional geography.
Very few DMAs fall entirely within one congressional district; most span not only more than one
district but more than one state. Matching generic ad coverage from 100 markets into 435
congressional districts proved unworkable, especially for geographically compact urban areas that
contain the most districts. We thus mapped ads run by each group to the state(s) where we know
they aired. For DMAs that encompass households in only one state (e.g., the Des Moines DMA),
the assignment of ads to states was straightforward. If an ad appeared on a station with a multi-state
DMA, however, we counted it as an ad that ran in each state. The Philadelphia media market, for
example, contains households in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. An issue ad appearing in
the Philadelphia media market, then, would have been seen by some viewers in all three states and
thus counted in the total for each. The restriction to the top 100 media markets left us without ad
data for Alaska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, while other missing data led us to exclude
Hawaii.
10
The main variable we use in the analysis to come is the ad count by group j in state i, divided
by the number of congressional districts. We use the per-district form because it provides better
comparability across states that have different populations, thus different numbers of viewers and
different numbers of legislators as potential targets. Unless stated otherwise, all references to state
ad counts in the discussion to come are states’ per-district numbers, rounded to one.
Finally, we calculated separately the incidence of ads by legislative stage, reflected in the
following time periods: (1) The beginning of the congress until the committees in the respective
chambers completed their markups in mid-June 2003. In the Senate, the committees with
jurisdiction were Finance and Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP); in the House,
they were Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce; (2) the two weeks between committee
action and floor adoption on June 27, i.e., the period that encompasses the debates on both the
House and Senate floor; (3) the period of conference deliberations, from June 27 until two weeks
before the final action in each chamber on the conference report, and (4) the final two weeks leading
up to each chamber’s vote on the conference report in late November.10 The data thus organized,
we can test whether groups’ issue ad targeting strategies change as inside objectives change.
The fact that the ad data are mapped at the state level limits the specificity of our hypothesis
tests, however, and increases our likelihood of a Type II error. State advertising buys will reflect a
group’s strategies with respect to targeting House members and senators in a state’s delegation;
indeed, these choices may be made jointly insofar as ad buys must respect media market boundaries
in targeting political ones and the timeline for a bill’s consideration is similar across chambers. We
thus measure issue salience and popularity as state attributes and political targeting in terms of
delegation composition. Subsidiary analysis will examine Senate-targeted ads separately from Housetargeted ads, but the data allow that analysis for only one group.
11
To measure the issue’s potential salience in the state, we use two terms. The first is the per
capita number of prescriptions filled by Medicare-age recipients in the state, a variable which should
also capture the popularity of a group’s position within one active subconstituency.11 The second is
the number of sites per district that organization i has in state j, where site refers to any office,
chapter, plant, or other facility with a distinct address. 12 The more sites a group has in a state, we
assume, the more numerous will be its members/employees and leaders (owners, managers, patrons,
or other “super-constituents”) likely to be attentive to issues affecting the group. To measure
constituency support for the group’s position we use the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey
(hereafter, NAES), which asked respondents specifically whether they supported a change in
Medicare to add prescription drug coverage. 13 This survey has the added advantage of being
conducted well prior to the emergence of issue advertising on the subject, and it included
respectable state-level samples, ranging from 62 for Delaware to 2387 for California. To capture
the popularity of the group’s position, we use percent (in decimals) supporting Medicare
prescription drug coverage for groups that supported coverage in 2000 and one minus that percent
for groups that opposed it.
Our second category of independent variables is based on member attributes that we think
important to a group’s targeting decisions. Recall our principal hypothesis: consistent with their
inside lobbying strategies, groups will increase their advertising buys to the extent an area is
populated by legislative allies, especially those on the committees of jurisdiction. At the same time,
we qualify that hypothesis, arguing that groups will tend to advertise in areas represented by swing
members when a floor vote is forthcoming and the outcome is likely to be close.
The problem thus becomes how to measure group expectations about the ex ante tendency
of delegation members to agree with the group’s policy objectives. For the analysis we report here,
we captured this tendency using members’ scores on the American Public Health Association’s
12
(APHA) voting index from the previous congress. Fowler reports that groups create such indexes
for the purpose of distinguishing interest group friends from foes (1982), and several lobbyists told
us that they use APHA scores for that purpose. DW-NOMINATE-generated classifications
actually produce stronger support for our claims, we should note, but they lack the APHA index’s
validity as an issue-specific indicator of interest group perceptions.
For a group that ran ads opposing the administration bill, we classify continuing House
members as likely allies if their prior APHA scores placed them above the 60th percentile for the
chamber. For newcomers in the 108th, we used the same threshold applied to their APHA score
from the 108th, excluding all MMA votes. For groups supporting the administration initiative, we
classify legislators as likely allies if their APHA score is below the 40th percentile. For groups on
both sides, we use the 20 percentile interval centered on, respectively, the chamber median for
House member and the filibuster pivot for senators.14 For the Senate, this category is the 20
percentile-range centered on the APHA 60th percentile.15 Senators whose scores were above the 70th
percentile were categorized as likely allies of the anti-bill groups, while Senators who fell below the
50th percentile were classified as likely allies of the pro-bill groups.
To characterize a state’s congressional delegation, in turn, we simply counted the number of
senators and House members (without weighting)16 from state i who fell into each category—ally
and swing, respectively— relative to group j. We then divided each of those counts by the size of
the delegation, i.e., two plus the number of congressional districts in the state. This gives us (i) the
percentage of the delegation for state i that is inclined to agree with group j on health issues, and (ii)
the percentage of the delegation, state i, that are near the pivot. These members are most likely to
be undecided and thus are classified as “swing” votes. For purposes of multivariate analysis, then,
the percentage of a state’s delegation opposed to group i will serve as the excluded category.
13
Based on the theoretical discussion above, several additional variables require specification.
We measure the presence of vulnerability at the delegation level with two terms. The first is the
percentage of the state delegation that is electorally insecure, defined as whether the House or
Senate member won with a margin less than 10 points in the last election or, for senators, whether
they are up for reelection in 2004.
Insofar as outside lobbying is an exercise in mobilization, committee allies should be primary
targets. These members have greater “productive capacity,” meaning that their efforts are more
likely to produce progress toward the advertising group’s policy objective (Denzau and Munger
1986). This is one of the reasons that Kollman emphasizes the importance of committee members
(e.g., 1998, 109-110), but it only partly overlaps the claim made by Goldstein imperfectly (1999). In
hypothesizing that groups will target influential members, Goldstein refers to “the swing members
on committee” as the influential ones, not group allies (59). Overall, mobilization campaigns
targeted supporters in only 9% of Goldstein’s cases (58, Table 4.3).
Finally, we adjust for other factors likely to affect the geographic incidence of state issue ads
related to the extra-political nature of media market boundaries. We include an indicator of
whether a state has major media markets that overlap metropolitan areas in other states and
therefore receive “spillover” advertising. Second, we include a separate indicator of whether the
state overlaps the Washington, D.C. media market, in which issue ads are unusually concentrated to
affect more directly actors on the inside – legislators, their staffs, and other inside-the-beltway
actors (Falk 2003; Falk, Grizard and McDonald. 2006).
Patterns of Advertising
Figure 1 graphs the weekly incidence of ads across the life cycle of the MMA in the 108th
Congress, 1st Session. Noteworthy for our purposes are the peaks in mid-June and late November,
the periods leading up to initial floor action and, later the same year, the final vote on the conference
14
report. These spikes reflect at least two things. First, the number of potential targets is greatest
during floor action and second, the legislative choices made on the floor are important substantively
and but also strategically; floor decisions at one stage set up a chamber’s bargaining position in the
next stage. For our purposes, the floor stage is especially important in that it sets up an important
test: If groups are targeting members in the pivotal middle of the distribution, the period
immediately preceding a vote on passage should be the moment they are most likely to do it.
Figure 1 about here
The bivariate patterns in the issue advertising data indicate that groups are not doing this.
The greater the presence of group allies in a state’s delegation, the more issue ads does the group run
in the state. The bivariate negative binomial (NB) coefficient from regressing the number of ads on
the percentage of all group allies is 1.36 (z=2.54), and for percentage of committee allies it is 2.50
(2.44). The analogous statistics for the percentage of swing members, in contrast, are not positive
but slightly negative: for the percentage of swing members it is -.61 (z=.68), and for the number of
committee swing members, it is -1.22 (z=-.77).
Though by no means dramatic, these relationships appear quite different than the bivariate
patterns that Goldstein found regarding a different, high-salience health bill (1999; see also 2001).
Goldstein found that groups engaging in outside lobbying on the Clinton healthcare bill
concentrated on the pivotal members. We could not find that pattern in the aggregate. No matter
how a delegation’s “undecided” or “swing” members were defined or which indicator of member
positions was used, we found no positive relationship with the incidence of issue advertising.17 Using
DW-NOMINATE rather than APHA scores to locate delegation members, the relationship
between issue ads per district and percentage allies was stronger (z=2.60), not weaker, and the
relationship was more precise (z=3.23), while swing member effect was still negative (-.26, z=.30).
15
A Model of Targeted Issue Advertisements
Several factors already identified are themselves related to the apparent policy agreement
between member and group. Most prominent among them are the two factors identified in
Kollman’s (1999) model of outside lobbying – the potential salience of the issue and the potential
popularity of the group’s position. How important are the several factors in the targeting of issue
advertisements? To what extent do they provide the conditions that shape how interest groups map
their political objectives into advertising buys?
Table 1 reports multivariate analyses of issue advertisements for the eleven months that the
MMA was before Congress in the 108th Congress. The dependent variable is the number of per
district ads broadcast in state i by group j.18 Because of the over-dispersion and complex error
structure of the group-state data, we use a mixed negative binomial estimator with state random
intercepts and group fixed effects.
Table 1 about here
Advertising to Allies
Model 1.1 uses a specification in which the conventional lobby-the-middle hypothesis is
given full play. We test for whether the presence of undecided committee members in the state
delegation generates greater advertising in that state. We also test for whether the presence of
pivotal rank and file legislators (committee non-members) does the same. Are interest groups
upping their advertising buys in media markets where the presence of likely swing legislators is high?
Consistent with the bivariate patterns, we find no such relationship. In fact, the coefficients for
both categories of swing legislators are negative, not positive.
In Model 1.2, we specify our alternative model, which assumes that outside lobbying is about
mobilization, not persuasion. Do groups run ads in areas represented disproportionately by their
legislative allies? Do they do so when those allies hold institutional positions that might do the
16
group the most policy good? The answer provided by Model 1.2 is yes on both counts. The higher
the percentage of rank and file allies in a state delegation, the more ads a group runs in that state,
and the effect of committee allies in the delegation appears to have a greater substantive impact, a
matter we take up momentarily. In making their advertising buys, it seems, groups want to motivate
their friends generally, and their most productive friends specifically.
Model 1.3 supports these conclusions, incorporating both the persuasion and mobilization
hypotheses in a head-to-head test. A delegation’s percentage of chamber allies and percentage of
committee allies have effects that remain basically unchanged from Model 1.2. The effects of the
pivotal-member variables, in turn, now look less anomalous in that they are non-negative, if
statistically insignificant, in the head-to-head specification of Model 1.3. Insofar as our data permit
us to discern, to the extent that states are represented by members near their chamber’s pivot, those
states witness no more ads than states represented by interest group opponents, the excluded
category in the Table 2 models.
To get a sense of the relative magnitudes, recall from Table 1 that the mean of issue ads per
district is 37, but the distribution is over-dispersed. Eighty percent of all observations are in the
range of 0 to 56 and 90% are in the range of 0 to 95. Figure 2 captures the substantive effects of
rank and file allies in the form of predicted counts of issue ads per district, holding other variables at
their medians or means. For the 16% of the observations where delegation i contains no allies of
group j other than those on committee, the predicted count of issue ads is 47. For a delegation at
the mean, .30, the predicted number is 58, but that increases to 70 ads per district at one standard
deviation above the mean, almost a 50% increase over a friendless delegation, and 82 ads at two SDs
above the mean.
Figure 2 about here
17
The presence of allies on the committees of jurisdiction likewise has the hypothesized effect.
Because two committees in each chamber had jurisdiction over some part of the MMA, there is
considerable variance in the presence of differently positioned committee members in a state’s
delegation. Ninety percent of all delegations, however, had at least one legislator serving on a
health-related committee. In 62% of the observations, one or more of the delegation’s committee
members was an ally of group j. Figure 3 uses predicted counts from Model 1.3 to represent the
substantive relationship between the percentage of a state’s delegation composed of committee allies
and the per district issue ad count in that state. The slope appears steeper than it was for a
delegation’s rank and file allies. When the percentage of committee allies is 0, the predicted count of
ads per state district is 37, but that number increases to almost 50 when a delegation’s committee
allies is set at them mean and 70 at one SD above the mean. But the full range of effects is much
larger: The 5% of the delegations that were especially high in committee allies --- 42% or two SDs
above the mean – have predicted counts of over 100 ads.
Figure 3 about here
Insofar as the results of Table 2 show that issue advertising buys in a state are affected by the
presence of committee members in a state’s delegation, we thus confirm Kollman (1998) and
Goldstein (1999), who argue that outside lobbying will target key players on the committee(s) of
jurisdiction. However, our analysis does not support Goldstein’s more specific claim that the “key
players” are the undecided members near the relevant pivot, in this case the respective committee
medians. Instead, the data are consistent with the view that outside lobbying is mainly about
mobilizing and rewarding well-positioned allies, not pulling pivotal members over to the group’s
point of view. If the latter is an important goal, as we think it is, interest groups pursue it indirectly
by inducing legislative friends to lobby their colleagues. As we find below, however, groups do
pursue that goal directly when the legislative time is right.
18
Issue Salience, Policy Popularity, and Electoral Vulnerability
Likewise embedded in the equations estimated for Table 2 are the two main hypotheses set
out most clearly in Kollman (1998), namely, that groups will outside lobby if (1) an issue is salient or
there are reasons to believe that it can be made salient; (2) the group’s position on the issue is
popular or can be made popular. Both find clear support in our analysis. The potential salience of
the Medicare prescription drug issue is captured by the first two variables in Table 1. The first is the
number of prescriptions filled per Medicare-eligible individual, which has a strong positive effect on
issue advertising in the state. The mean of this measure is 26.3 with a standard deviation of 5.5. At
one SD below the mean, the predicted number of ads is 40; at one SD above the mean it is over 60.
But the likely salience of an issue, we predicted, should also be greater in states where a group has an
organizational presence, a claim that dates to Kingdon’s classic study of legislators’ voting decisions
(1981 [1973]). Measured as the number of sites per congressional district, this variable also has a
significant, positive relationship with the incidence of issue advertising by the group. The predicted
count of issue ads per district in a state with no organizational sites is 37. At one SD above the
mean it increases to 48,and at two SDs above the mean, it is 58.
The second constituency factor Kollman identifies as important to outside lobbying
decisions is the current or likely popularity of a group’s policy. Unless they think their issue ads
immensely persuasive, interest groups are unlikely to make expensive advertising buys in areas where
the priors of the audience run strongly contrary to the group’s message. Does that hypothesis hold
for the MMA case? The two indicators of salience no doubt capture popularity as well as salience,
but thanks to the issue-specific polling of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, we have a more
focused measure of state-level public support for Medicare prescription drug coverage. As Model
1.3 shows, the effect of this variable is correct in sign but statistically insignificant. That the survey
occurred in 2000 is an advantage insofar as we avoid picking up any endogenous effect of issue
19
advertising effect, but because it was well prior to the 2003 debate, it may be less accurate that the
contemporaneous information to the group strategist, such as the Kaiser measure of state Medicare
recipients.
Finally, the results reported in Table 2 support the hypothesis that groups will target their
advertisements in the states of members whose electoral vulnerability should make them especially
sensitive to grassroots activity. Advertising buys, we find, are more extensive in areas represented
by members who last won office by margins of fewer than ten points and senators up for reelection
in 2004. Delegations with no vulnerable members exhibit predicted counts of 35 issue ads per
district, 50 ads at the conditional mean, and 75 ads at one SD above the conditional mean. Groups
locate their advertising in areas where the effects of their ads on constituents, in fact or in
expectation, are more likely to generate second-order effects on representatives worried about
reelection. We return to the implications of this result in the conclusion.
Issue Advertising by Legislative Stage
If outside advertising is driven by inside ends, a group’s advertising targets should change as
the key players change in a sequential process. We explore this general claim by analyzing the
advertising data broken down into four intervals: (1) committee consideration, i.e., the period from
bill introduction to the beginning of floor action; (2) the two weeks of initial floor action, ending in
the floor votes on adoption in late June 2003; (3) the conference period, i.e., the 15 weeks from the
June floor vote until the conference report; and (4) final action, i.e., the final two weeks of action
ending in adoption of the conference report in late November.19 Table 2 reports re-estimations of
Model 1.3 after disaggregating the data by these stages.
Table 2 about here
Model 2.1 reports the coefficient estimates of our multilevel NB model for ads broadcast in
the first half of 2003, when the respective chambers’ bills were being negotiated behind the scenes
20
and marked up in the respective committees of jurisdiction. In the early stages of legislative action,
the active engagement of legislative allies is especially important. They carry the water for the cause,
writing the legislation and negotiating deals, gaining cosponsors, and planning parliamentary strategy.
This is heavy legislative lifting, for which public visibility is relatively low. Inside lobbying by interest
group allies serves to subsidize that work, Hall and Deardorff (2006) argue, but lobbyist help does
not eliminate the need for the member’s own investment of legislative time and political capital. By
raising an issue’s salience with the legislator’s electorate, issue advertising should incentivize such
investments. Her otherwise invisible work in Washington will gain her greater credit-claiming ability
back home.
The data support this hypothesis. Model 2.1 reports a positive, statistically significant
coefficient for the percentage of committee allies in the state delegation on advertising the pre-floor
stage. Given that the number of important legislative players at this stage is small, issue advertising
in the aggregate is low. The average number of ads per district ads is 12.3. Relative to that level, the
effect of friendly committee members is substantial. States whose delegations had no committee
allies saw about 12 issue ads per district, while those at one SD above the mean (30%) witnessed 19,
a difference of more than 50%. At two SDs (.45) above the mean, the predicted count is double.
In light of past work on outside lobbying, these results are noteworthy. If issue advertising
is intended to win over committee equivocators, as Goldstein found (1998), we should see positive
coefficients for the presence of committee members near the pivot, and the substantive effects
should be greater than for the presence of committee allies. Consistent with the bivariate patterns
reported above, however, the presence of committee swing members has a negative effect, sharply
so, not positive. In fact, the variable remains negative at every stage analyzed in Table 2.
Periods 2 (Model 2.2) and 4 (Model 2.4) represent two-week periods leading up to crucial
floor votes in both chambers. The former precedes initial adoption in late June and the latter
21
precedes adoption of the conference report in late November. At those moments we are most likely
to see ads concentrated in areas represented by swing legislators, as groups retarget their advertising
buys to pressure legislators whom they anticipate will be decisive in close floor votes.
In one critical period, that is what we find. Figure 4 illustrates for all four periods the effect
of floor swing voters as a percentage of a state’s delegation. The effect of going from no swing
members in the delegation to 25% of the delegation, approximately one SD above the mean, is
virtually zero for two of the four periods and modest for a third. In the two weeks preceding the
June votes on passage, in contrast, that same change creates a sharply upward slope, producing a
four-fold increase in the number of ads per district, from 7 to almost 30. As interest group
strategists anticipated, the initial floor votes would prove very close. The House vote on passage was
called just after midnight the morning of June 27, but when the yeas and nays were tallied, the bill
had failed, 215 to 216. Only after keeping the vote open for an unprecedented three hours did the
floor leaders secure a bare majority. Once they had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, the
Speaker declared the vote closed at 216-215 (Dewar and Goldstein 2003). The bill easily passed in
the Senate the same day, 76-21, but only after a series of unfriendly amendments had been defeated
by as few as two votes.
As Table 2 also shows, however, the presence of committee allies has a positive and
significant effect at every stage, including both the mid-summer floor action and the postconference debate. In a qualification of his general claim, Goldstein argues that outside lobbying
should target cue-givers as well as wavering receivers. Our results are consistent with his claim,
insofar as the cue-givers one targets are the ones with whom the group is already allied. More
generally, the pattern suggests that at key moments in the process outside strategies bent on
persuasion and mobilization can work in concert. If outside lobbying primes the ambivalent
22
member to go the interest group’s way, groups also need coalition- leaders to press the case with
their colleagues.
Figure 4 about here
We see no similar targeting of swing members in the two weeks leading up to the November
votes on the conference report. But we do see a positive, significant effect for both committee allies
and floor allies. Put differently, groups did not spend their advertising dollars near the very end of
the process in areas represented by swing legislators (whether on the committee or not), as they had
in mid-June; they left their bets where they had placed them through most of the process. This
might seem unsurprising in that bill managers had secured a more comfortable majority in the weeks
following the extraordinary House vote on passage. That pivotal floor members were not targeted
leading up to the November votes may also reflect the fact that by this time most members had
made up their minds, a fact that the interest group strategists would know from their own
intelligence. The June floor debate, among other sources, provided legislators with good
information about the connections between alternative policies and their real-world outcomes, and
the general salience of the issue had increased with extensive national publicity. In the House,
moreover, members had opportunities to revisit some of the specific issues and reveal their
preferences about them. Over the period July to early November, the House held roll calls on some
20 motions to instruct the conferees, though all but two of them failed by double-digit margins.
Targeting Senators and House Members
The examination of targeting thus far has focused on the relationship between the
composition of the state delegation and the incidence of issue advertising, reflecting the fact that ad
buys are constrained by the geography of media markets that map imperfectly into congressional
geography. In effect, we have been assuming that groups make advertising buys as part of a joint
House-Senate outside lobbying strategy. Given that the MMA timetable was almost identical in the
23
two chambers, this assumption seems reasonable, but in this section we set it aside and exploit
information contained in the data regarding Senate-targeted vs. House-targeted advertisements by
the only group to run non-generic ads, the United Seniors Association. While these data do not
reliably identify the specific member targeted, we determined, they do reveal the chamber of the
target.
We approach this analysis in two imperfect ways. One is to analyze the Senate- and Housetargeted ads separately. A limitation in doing so is that generic ads that run in overlapping media
markets may be substitutes for member-specific ads, especially where districts and states share urban
markets. As another check on the robustness of our results, we thus estimate a second pair of
models that combine, first, the House-targeted and generic ads, and, second, the Senate-targeted and
generic ads. The idea is to triangulate by making alternately exclusive and inclusive assumptions
about the way that interest group advertising packages are purchased.
. USA was one of the two top issue advertisers on the MMA; it made ad buys in 45 of the
46 states in our dataset. Models 3.1 and 3.2 report the negative binomial analyses of USA’s Senatefocused and House-focused ads, respectively. Models 3.3 and 3.4 report the analyses of the
combined Senate and generic ads and the combined House and generic ads, respectively.
Table 3 about here
Several things are immediately apparent from the Table 3 results. First, the presence of allies
in the state delegations exhibit statistically significant effects on ads in both chambers using both
measures, despite the small number of observations. Second, those estimates differ very little when
we add the generic ads to targeted senators (Model 3.3) and, respectively, generic ads to House
members (3.4). But third, all of the coefficients for the presence of swing voters in the respective
chamber delegations are positive, two appear relatively large, and one achieves statistical significance.
24
Figure 5 illustrates these effects by showing the difference in predicted counts when one
goes from the mean levels of state delegation swings and allies, respectively, and one standard
deviation above those means. The first two bars capture the increase in the predicted counts for the
Senate-targeted ads; the second two do so for the House targeted-ads. The substantive conclusions
of the earlier analyses are borne out more starkly by the advertising behavior of the USA. The probill organization preferred advertising to Senate allies more than swing senators by almost 2:1. It
preferred advertising to House allies more than swing members by more than 4:1. At the same time,
the results strongly suggest that USA strategists favored states represented by swing members more
than states represented by strong opponents, the excluded category in the analysis. Thus are the first
and third bars also positive.
Figure 3 about here
Conclusion
Grassroots campaigns in the U.S. date to 18th Century petitions to abolish the slave trade and
taxpayer protests in Boston Harbor. Over the recent past, however, the business of grassroots
politics has become highly professionalized (Walker 2009). Hundreds of consultants now sell their
savvy to firms, unions, trade associations, public interest groups, and state and local governments,
advising them on how to spend their money in mobilizing some citizens and not others to
participate in politics between elections. A substantial and growing share of that money goes to
television issue advertising.
Nonetheless we know very little about the role that paid advertising plays in interest group
advocacy. This paper begins to fill the gap, providing one of the first systematic studies of where,
when, and why interest groups use issue advertising to achieve their legislative objectives. Our
analysis of television issue advertising on the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill confirms basic
propositions drawn from the literature on outside lobbying, namely, that interest groups will target
25
their issue advertising buys in areas where an issue is salient or can be made salient and where
incumbent legislators are electorally vulnerable.
At the same time, we revisit the assumptions about inside lobbying on which theorizing
about outside lobbying depends. If inside lobbying subsidizes the costs that allies bear in promoting
a common cause, outside lobbying incentivizes legislators to pay them. By making an issue more
salient to the constituents of legislative allies, those allies have greater reason to act as if they are
pursuing the interest group’s objectives in Washington, even if their minds are focused on newly
attentive constituents back home. Our empirical analysis supports this view. In the MMA case, we
find that issue advertisers targeted state delegations to the extent that they were represented by
legislative allies, especially allies that sat on the relevant committees. Only briefly but strategically
did television advertising buys favor states represented by members near the floor pivot.
This study is at best a beginning, of course. That media markets do not map neatly into
congressional geography makes for inefficiency in interest group targeting, and it produces
imprecision in our tests. That we nonetheless find evidence for our main hypotheses is encouraging,
but it also suggests that more research is needed. The MMA is only one case, and it is typical of all
cases in that it is atypical in some ways that we cannot know. In retrospect, it appears that the MMA
debate occurred at a time when television issue advertising, while already common, was about to
witness explosive growth. We thus have much more to learn about where, when, and why interest
groups invest in outside advertising, especially in highly competitive contexts. When we do, we
should be better able to answer a number of closely related, perhaps more important questions
about whether issue advertising matters in the legislative decision making it is intended to affect.
26
Table 1.
Multi-Level Negative Binomial Models of State Issue Ads:
The Medicare Prescription Drug Bill of 2003
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------(1)
(2)
(3)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------State Constituency Attributes
prescriptions per capita - over 651
sites per district
% state survey - support Medicare Rx2
State Delegation Attributes
.04*
(.02)
.46*
(.25)
.02
(.01)
.04*
(.01)
.50*
(.20)
.01
(.01)
.04*
(.01)
.47*
(.21)
.01
(.01)
.68*
(.36)
2.14*
(.53)
1.97*
(.59)
.71
(1.00)
-.41
(.89)
.76*
(.37)
2.24*
(.54)
2.00*
(.60)
3
% delegation non-committee swings
% delegation committee swings
-1.10
(1.02)
-.58
(1.02)
% delegation – non-committee allies
% delegation – committee allies
% delegation - marginal seats4
2.19*
(.69)
Media Market Controls
state borders metro media market
.26
.27
.27
(.20)
(.19)
(.19)
state borders DC media market
.81*
.73*
.64*
(.33)
(.27)
(.30)
Constant
-.84
-1.08*
-1.01*
(.61)
(.57)
(.57)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wald chi-sq
313.38
362.92
367.78
Prob > chi2 =
.0000
.0000
.0000
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------* p< .05, one-tailed
n of obs.=230
Note: DV = # of television ads per district aired in state i by group j for the
entire process. (See discussion in text). Entries are negative binomial coefficients with state random intercepts and group fixed effects (group dummies not
shown). Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, and South Dakota omitted due to missing data.
See discussion in text and notes below for variable definitions and data sources.
________________________________________________________________________________
1.
Kaiser Family Foundation, “Kaiser/Commonwealth/Tufts-New England Medical Center 2003
National Survey of Seniors and Prescription Drugs,” 2003
2. National Annenberg Election Survey, 2001 National Rolling Cross-Section See discussion in text.
3. Tabulated based on the American Public Health Association’s Annual Vote Tallies.
4. Almanac of American Politics 2004.
27
Table 2.
Multi-Level Negative Binomial Models of State Issue Ads per District by
Legislative Stage: The Medicare Prescription Drug Bill of 2003
______________________________________________________________________________________
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
before
during
floor vote preentire
committee
floor
to early
final
process
report
action
November
vote
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------State Constituency Attributes
prescriptions per capita - > 65
sites per district
% state survey - pr Medicare Rx
.05*
(.02)
.39
(.26)
.01
(.01)
.06*
(.03)
-.53
(.35)
-.00
(.02)
.07*
(.02)
.20
(.26)
.01
(.02)
.01
(.02)
.52*
(.27)
.02
(.01)
.04*
(.01)
.47*
(.21)
.01
(.01)
-.11
(1.32)
-3.22*
(1.26)
.73
(.48)
1.67*
(.87)
2.21*
(.81)
5.86*
(2.04)
-1.61
(1.75)
.53
(.65)
4.74*
(.95)
1.41
(1.09)
1.15
(1.18)
-2.06*
(1.09)
.15
(.48)
3.18*
(.46)
1.98*
(.66)
-.85
(1.11)
-.38
(.94)
1.27*
(.48)
1.58*
(.54)
1.20*
(.55)
.71
(1.00)
-.41
(.89)
.76*
(.37)
2.24*
(.54)
2.00*
(.60)
State Delegation Attributes
% delegation non-cmte. swings
% delegation committee swings
% delegation non-cmte. allies
% delegation committee allies
% delegation – margin < 10%
Media Market Controls
state borders metro media market
.31
.30
.13
-.09
.27
(.24)
(.33)
(.20)
(.19)
(.19)
state borders DC media market
.89*
.01
.36
.59*
.64*
(.40)
(.58)
(.39)
(.35)
(.30)
Constant
-1.89*
-1.88*
-3.08*
-1.26*
-1.01*
(.74)
(1.03)
(.78)
(.67)
(.57)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wald chi-sq
104.75
59.20
138.57
16 .14
367.78
Prob > chi2 =
0.0000
0.0001
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* p< .05, one-tailed
n of obs.=230
Note: DV = # of television ads per district aired in state i by group j for the
specified period. Entries are negative binomial coefficients with state random
intercepts and group fixed effects (group dummies not shown). Alaska, Hawaii, North
Dakota, and South Dakota omitted due to missing data. For variable definitions and
data sources, see discussion in text and notes to Table 1.
28
Table 3.
Negative Binomial Models of MMA Issue Ads: Targeting Issue Advertising by
the United Seniors Association
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Senate
Senate
House
House
ads
+ generic
ads
+ generic
ads
ads
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------State Constituency Attributes
prescriptions per capita - over 65
sites per district
% state survey - support Medicare Rx
.02
(.04)
.66
(.85)
.06*
(.03)
.01
(.03)
.53
(.83)
.04*
(.03)
1.57
(1.08)
2.07*
(1.25)
1.80*
(1.04)
1.98*
(1.11)
.04*
(.02)
2.74*
(.64)
.03
(.02)
.04*
(.02)
2.59*
(.64)
.02
(.02)
1.01
(1.34)
2.48*
(.92)
.84
(1.37)
2.38*
(.96)
1.30
(.88)
1.16
(.84)
.14
(.26)
.71*
(.43)
.34
(1.36)
.09
(.26)
.66
(.40)
.67
(1.33)
Senate/House Delegation Attributes
% Senators - swings
% Senators - allies
% House members - swings
% House members - allies
senator up for reelection in 2004
% Senators - margin < 10 pts.
.73*
(.44)
.68
(.85)
.80*
(.43)
.76
(.66)
% House delegation - margin <10%
Media Market Controls
state borders metro media market
state borders DC media market
Constant
-.54
(.45)
2.35*
(1.28)
1.58
(1.72)
-.56‡
(.43)
2.16*
(1.11)
-.85
(1.52)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wald chi-sq
15.60
14.40
37.88
36.18
Prob > chi2 =
.0756
.1087
.0000
.0000
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* p< .05, one-tailed
n of obs. = 46
Note: DV = # of television ads per district aired in state i by the United Seniors
Association, January-November 2003. Entries are negative binomial coefficients with
robust SEs. “Swing” members for the Senate are the 20 percent of senators centered on
the filibuster pivot. For the House, “swings” refers to the 20% centered on the
chamber median. Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, and South Dakota omitted due to missing
data. For variable definitions and data sources, see discussion in text and notes to
Table 1.
29
Figure 1.Issue Advertising While Legislating: Weekly Ads on The
Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, January – November 2003
30
Figure 2. Targeting Floor Allies:
Issue Advertising on the MMA of 2003
120
n of ads per district
100
80
60
40
20
0
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
% delegation - floor allies
Note: Estimates from Model 2.3. Dotted lines represent a 95% confidence interval.
31
Figure 3. Targeting Committee Allies:
Issue Advertising on the MMA of 2003
150
# of ads per district
125
100
75
50
25
0
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
% delegation - committee allies
Note: Estimates from Model 2.3. Dotted lines represent a 95% confidence interval
32
Figure 4. Targeting Swing Voters:
The MMA of 2003
# of ads per district
30
20
10
0
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
% delegation - sw ing voters
in committee
during floor debate
during conference
final floor action
Note: Estimates from Model 2.1 – 2.4. Dotted lines represent a 95% confidence interval
33
Figure 5. Targeting Senate and House: United Seniors
Association Ads on the MMA of 2003
30
Δ in ads per district
25
20
15
10
5
0
Senate sw ings
Senate allies
House sw ings
House allies
Presence in Delegation
Note: Bars represent the change in ads per district associated with a change from
the mean of that category to one SD above the mean.
34
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Endnotes
1
An unpublished paper by Goldstein (2001.), on which we draw here, is the only exception we can
find. The Baumgartner et al. multi-year study (2009) of lobbying, for instance, mentions issue
advertising only in passing. Nownes’ book, Total Lobbying, includes only a single sentence (2006, 88).
2
In the present analysis we benefit from the fact that the MMA debate in the 108th Congress began
in January of 2003 and ended in November, eleven months before the next election.
3
Groups also engage in outside advertising to expand membership, improve their reputation, or
otherwise promote organizational maintenance. We screened out ads where this goal was evident.
4
Members may also have financial incentives to do this. See, e.g., Box-Steffensmeier and Grant
(1999); Denzau and Munger (1986); Esterling (2007); Hall and Wayman (1990).
5
On the cognitive processes by which members make inferences about contstiuents’ beliefs from
(non-randomly generated) mail, see Miler (2010).
6
In contrast, a legislator cannot observe the frequency of telephone, door-to-door, or direct mail
appeals. If unsuccessful, such efforts areless likely to reveal the weakness of the group’s message.
7
See Fiorina 1974, Ch. 3. For the unusual conditions under which this may not hold, see pp.57-63.
8
Falk, Grizard, and McDonald (2006, 152-154) discuss the complications of identifying and coding
issue ads, both print and broadcast data in the DC area. Few of the problems they identify arose in
our coding of MMA television ads, which included only a few dozen distinct storyboards.
9
The main cleavage in the debate was between extending Medicare coverage of prescriptions vs. the
Bush proposal for Medicare-subsidized private insurance. The groups’ positions were clear with the
partial exception of the AARP. AARP opposed the bill through most of the process, endorsing it
ten days before the final votes on the conference report. Our coding reflects this change.
10
The respective Senate and House committees completed markup of their bills in mid-June 2003
within a few days of each other. The bills passed their respective chambers on June 27.
38
11
These data come from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2003 survey. See Kaiser/Commonwealth/
Tufts-New England Medical Center 2003 National Survey of Seniors and Prescription Drugs.”
12
Sites were identified using the Mergent Online database for firms and the Guidestar database for
nonprofits and checked against their archived websites for 2003.
13
To measure support for the AARP and ARA position in 2000, we use the percentage who agreed
with the statement: “The federal government should cover prescription drugs through Medicare.”
We use one minus that fraction for the others, who strongly opposed the Clinton proposal in 2000.
14
We use the 20% interval rather than, say 33%, because it captures those likely to be undecided
more cleanly, given the bimodal distribution of congressional voting. We also measured delegation
support for the group position using party composition (percent Republican, pro-bill, Democrat
anti-bill.) Party is less useful in that it does not identify swing legislators in a delegation. In any
case, party composition was consistently insignificant when added to the analyses.
15
We tested ranges around other cut-points and wider intervals, with little statistical consequence.
16
Weighting senators and representatives equally is the simplest tack, but it is not an obvious one.
Given that ad buys are made with respect to media markets, each one of which includes at least one
House member and two senators, neither is 4.35 to 1. We return to this in the penultimate section.
17
But see the discussion of senator-specific advertising below.
18
Rounded to one, we treat the variable as if it were a count variable, when in fact it is a ratio created
from a count. The per-district form provides better comparability across states, which have different
numbers of viewers and potential legislative targets, but it retains the characteristics of the state
counts, including a high concentration of zeros and over-dispersion.
19
The choice of precise dates dividing the periods is slightly arbitrary but proved inconsequential.
39