About Our Lobbying Data
Overview
Lobbying firms and organizations that employ in-house lobbyists are required to register with the House and Senate if they communicate with a key executive branch or legislative branch official on behalf of a client about federal legislation, regulations, programs, policies, nominations or related topics. LegiStorm collects and processes these forms to help our subscribers track the who’s-who in lobbying, top firms and trending issues. Lobbying forms are filed by the registrant – that is, the organization that conducts the lobbying activities. Forms are only filed by individual lobbyists if they are self-employed. Separate registrations and reports must be filed for each “contract”, or each registrant-client pair.
- New client registrations – are filed when a firm takes on a new client. For in-house lobbying the registrant and client are the same organization.
- Quarterly reports – disclose the total amount spent on lobbying for the period (that is, income for a firm with external clients or expenses for in-house lobbying), specific details about the issues being lobbied for and information about the lobbyists covering each issue. Note that prior to 2008 registrants filed mid-year and year-end reports instead of quarterly reports.
- Terminations reports – are filed when a registrant-client relationship ends. These reports will also include the same information covered in quarterly reports for any lobbying activities during the prior quarter.
These filings have to list certain information about each lobbyist working on the contract, including:
- Covered positions – If a lobbyist served in a covered position within the past 20 years they must disclose the position and dates served on all filings. Covered positions include any high-level position in Congress or the executive branch. The basic rule of thumb is that if a staffer had to file a financial disclosure, they are obligated to disclose a covered position. However, many lobbying firms will overdisclose and sometimes mistakenly include the current title of the lobbyist as the "covered position".
- Convictions - Beginning in 2019, lobbyists who were convicted in a federal or state court of an offense involving bribery, extortion, embezzlement, an illegal kickback, tax evasion, fraud, a conflict of interest, making a false statement, perjury or money laundering must disclose the date of the conviction and a description of the offense on all filings.
For more detailed information about lobbying disclosure requirements, see Lobbying Disclosure Act Guidance.
Our Data
We gather domestic lobbying data (LDA filings) from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, using the House database in cases where conflicting filing data is provided. Our database includes filings going back to 1999. We provide spending and other trend data beginning with Q1 2008, when the reporting period changed from semi-annual to quarterly.
Our Methodology
In order to provide helpful analysis of trends in lobbying, we make certain calculations, assumptions and estimates based on the available data.
Party Affiliation
Party affiliation information is not disclosed on lobbying filings. However, our Revolving Door dataset tracks individuals as the move between Congress and K Street, and we use this revolver information to calculate whether a firm is likely to have stronger connections to Democratic or Republican politicians and operatives. We consider a lobbyist to be affiliated with the Democratic or Republican party if they previously held a partisan elected, appointed or employment position.
To determine the affiliation of an organization, we first check to see if more than 25% of active lobbyists are partisan (that is, lobbyists who are either Democratic or Republican affiliated). If so, we calculate the percent of partisan lobbyists who are Democrats vs. Republican. An organization is “Strongly” Democratic or Republican if more than 80% of partisan lobbyists are affiliated with the party, and is “Moderately” Democratic or Republican if 60%-80% of partisan lobbyists are affiliated with the party. Otherwise, the firm is labeled as Unknown/Nonpartisan. In search filters, “Strongly” and “Moderately” are combined into a single “Leaning” category.
Spending – Amounts less than $5,000
When registrants have more than $5,000 in income or expenses, they are supposed to report the exact amount. If they have less than $5,000 they check a box without reporting an amount. For charts and calculations, we use $0 as the amount in this case.
Spending – Income vs. Expenses
We use the term “Spending” to refer to both income and expenses reports on the lobbying disclosures. Income is the amount received by a lobbying firm from an external client for their lobbying activities. Expenses are the amount paid by an organization that employs in-house lobbyists – including both the amount spent in-house as well as any amount paid to external lobbying firms.
When displaying in-house spending and when including in-house spending in calculations, we subtract any outside spending from the total reported expenses so that only the in-house portion is considered (i.e., so that the organizations external spending is not double-counted).
For example:
XYZ Association employs one full-time lobbyist who they paid $20,000 in Q1. They also paid an outside firm Lobbyists ‘R’ Us $100,000 in Q1 to conduct additional lobbying activities.
On the Q1 report: XYZ Association will report $120,000 expenses. Lobbyists ‘R’ Us will report $100,000 income. In this case, our website would display/use in calculations $20,000 in-house spending for XYZ Association and $100,000 spending for Lobbyists ‘R’ Us.
Spending – Issue estimates
Registrants only report the total amount of spending, and do not provide a breakdown by issue on their filings. We calculate estimated spending per issue by allocating a portion of the total amount to each issue based on the number of lobbyists covering it. While this methodology won’t exactly match the actual per-issue spending, it does provide the best available overall picture of the allocation of lobbying resources.
For example, on their Q1 filing for the client XYZ Association, the registrant Lobbyists ‘R’ Us reported $100,000 spent on lobbying activities related to three issues: Trade (covered by 1 lobbyist -- Bob Robertson), Transportation (covered by 2 lobbyists -- Bob Robertson and John Johnson), and Education (covered by 3 lobbyists – Bob Robertson, John Johnson, and Peter Peterson).
We would calculate estimated spending on Trade as such: $100,000 * ((1 Trade lobbyist) / (1 Trade lobbyist + 2 Transportation lobbyists + 3 Education lobbyists)) = $16,667.
