UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Legislative Politics

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    BY INVITATION ONLY: A LEGISLATIVE THEORY ON PUBLIC LOBBYING AND THE GATEKEEPERS OF INFLUENCE
    (2019) Vallejo Vera, Sebastián; Calvo, Ernesto; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In democratic politics, the participation of interest groups in policymaking is commonly understood as a secluded affair; an exchange were interest groups actively influence the fine print of statutory laws without being observed by the public at large. Why would interest groups and policymakers make public an otherwise private affair? By focusing on the public participation of interest groups in legislative committees, I argue that legislators use the public participation of interest groups in the legislative process as a means to raise the salience of issues they own. By taking advantage of the sequential organization of the legislature, legislators with gatekeeping authority will open the gates of committees to interest groups when the party benefits from the increased public attention and close them when the party does not. Interest groups, on their part, are granted access to micro-manage policy--to benefit from specific modifications of a law--. Evidence to test my arguments comes from an original dataset of 6,989 instances of interest group participation in committee meetings in the Ecuadorian Congress between 1979 and 2018, as well as over 30 semi-structured interviews to interest group representatives, legislators, and congressional staff. I find that, not only are legislators inviting interest groups to participate in issues the party owns, but they are doing so at a greater rate when the exposure of the party brand matters the most: before an election.