Revisiting the link between PAC contributions and lobbying expenditures

Data on campaign contributions of PACs (political action committees) in the US does not contain the PACs' issues of concern. Additionally, while recent US lobbying data details the issues of concern for an interest group, it does not detail the Congressional representatives lobbied by the interest group. Expanding the time-frame of earlier work, I confirm that PACs engaging in lobbying and campaign contributions account for the majority of such political money despite representing a small minority of all PACs. I show how this allows construction of a novel dataset that decomposes representative-specific contributions across issues as well as issue-specific lobbying expenditures across representatives. This decomposition can qualitatively a¤ect results regarding the relationship between political money and Congressional voting behavior on trade policy.