Inferring the Policy Domains of Federal Agencies from Lobbying

Federal agencies are important for the implementation of policy, yet the complex nature of agency jurisdictions has made it difficult to understand which agencies are in charge of what policy areas. We offer a new perspective on this problem by examining the behavior of lobbyists. We assume that when we observe a lobbyist lobby multiple federal agencies, those agencies likely have overlapping policy domains. This motivates an exploratory factor analysis which explains lobbyist-agency links with agency-specific weights, which we interpret as agency policy domains. Studying data on over 38,000 unique lobbyists who have lobbied 185 federal agencies from 1998 through 2018, we find support for five core policy domains, which together explain nearly 50% of the variation in agency-specific lobbying. These five policy domains appear to be: banking and economy, environment, military and aviation, justice and civil rights, and healthcare. We then examine whether average agency employee ideal points from previous research are correlated with our policy domains. We find strong and consistent evidence that the employees of the military and aviation domain lean Republican, relative to other agencies, and we find suggestive evidence that justice and civil rights domain employees lean more Democratic