Television Issue Advertising and Legislative Strategy:The Inside Ends of Outside Lobbying

Richard L. Hall and Molly E. ReynoldsUniversity 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

1

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

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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.

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

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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, 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.

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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-to-head 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

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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 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

6

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 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

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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 outside

lobbying only briefly, however. Where they do, they note that outside

lobbying highlights an important limitation of their model. Lobbying as

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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

9

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.

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 non-salient 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

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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 145-

147). 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.

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).

11

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

12

to be close. Insofar as 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,

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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 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

14

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.

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.

15

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

16

ads separately from House-targeted ads, but the data allow that analysis for

only one group.

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

17

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 (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

18

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.

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

19

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

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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

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).

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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).

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?

22

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 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

23

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

24

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

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

25

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.

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

26

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

advertising effect, but because it was well prior to the 2003 debate, it may

27

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

28

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 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

29

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 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

30

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 post-conference 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

31

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.

32

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 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 House-targeted 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

33

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 Senate-focused 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.

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.

34

The substantive conclusions of the earlier analyses are borne out more

starkly by the advertising behavior of the USA. The pro-bill 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.

35

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 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

36

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.

37

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 .04* .04* .04* (.02) (.01) (.01) sites per district .46* .50* .47* (.25) (.20) (.21) % state survey - support Medicare Rx2 .02 .01 .01 (.01) (.01) (.01) State Delegation Attributes 3

% delegation non-committee swings -1.10 .71 (1.02) (1.00) % delegation committee swings -.58 -.41 (1.02) (.89) % delegation – non-committee allies .68* .76* (.36) (.37) % delegation – committee allies 2.14* 2.24* (.53) (.54) % delegation - marginal seats4 2.19* 1.97* 2.00* (.69) (.59) (.60) 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 theentire process. (See discussion in text). Entries are negative binomial coef- ficients 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.

38

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 pre- entire committee floor to early final process report action November vote--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------State Constituency Attributes

prescriptions per capita - > 65 .05* .06* .07* .01 .04* (.02) (.03) (.02) (.02) (.01)sites per district .39 -.53 .20 .52* .47* (.26) (.35) (.26) (.27) (.21) % state survey - pr Medicare Rx .01 -.00 .01 .02 .01 (.01) (.02) (.02) (.01) (.01)State Delegation Attributes

% delegation non-cmte. swings -.11 5.86* 1.15 -.85 .71 (1.32) (2.04) (1.18) (1.11) (1.00) % delegation committee swings -3.22* -1.61 -2.06* -.38 -.41 (1.26) (1.75) (1.09) (.94) (.89) % delegation non-cmte. allies .73 .53 .15 1.27* .76* (.48) (.65) (.48) (.48) (.37) % delegation committee allies 1.67* 4.74* 3.18* 1.58* 2.24* (.87) (.95) (.46) (.54) (.54) % delegation – margin < 10% 2.21* 1.41 1.98* 1.20* 2.00* (.81) (1.09) (.66) (.55) (.60) 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 thespecified 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.

39

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 .02 .01 .04* .04* (.04) (.03) (.02) (.02) sites per district .66 .53 2.74* 2.59* (.85) (.83) (.64) (.64) % state survey - support Medicare Rx .06* .04* .03 .02 (.03) (.03) (.02) (.02) Senate/House Delegation Attributes

% Senators - swings 1.57 1.80* (1.08) (1.04) % Senators - allies 2.07* 1.98* (1.25) (1.11) % House members - swings 1.01 .84 (1.34) (1.37) % House members - allies 2.48* 2.38* (.92) (.96) senator up for reelection in 2004 .73* .80* (.44) (.43) % Senators - margin < 10 pts. .68 .76 (.85) (.66) % House delegation - margin <10% 1.30 1.16 (.88) (.84) Media Market Controls

state borders metro media market -.54 -.56‡ .14 .09 (.45) (.43) (.26) (.26) state borders DC media market 2.35* 2.16* .71* .66 (1.28) (1.11) (.43) (.40) Constant 1.58 -.85 .34 .67 (1.72) (1.52) (1.36) (1.33)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------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.

40

Figure 1.Issue Advertising While Legislating: Weekly Ads on The Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, January – November 2003

41

Note: Estimates from Model 2.3. Dotted lines represent a 95% confidence interval.

Figure 2. Targeting Floor Allies: Issue Advertising on the MMA of 2003

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

% delegation - floor allies

n of

ads

per

dis

tric

t

42

Note: Estimates from Model 2.3. Dotted lines represent a 95% confidence interval

Figure 3. Targeting Committee Allies: Issue Advertising on the MMA of 2003

0

25

50

75

100

125

150

0% 10% 20% 30% 40%

% delegation - committee allies

# of

ads

per

dis

trict

43

Note: Estimates from Model 2.1 – 2.4. Dotted lines represent a 95% confidence interval

Figure 4. Targeting Swing Voters: The MMA of 2003

0

10

20

30

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%

% delegation - sw ing voters

# of

ads

per

dis

tric

t

in committee during floor debate

during conference final floor action

44

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.

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Δ in

ads

per

dis

tric

t

Senate sw ings Senate allies House sw ings House allies

Presence in Delegation

Figure 5. Targeting Senate and House: United Seniors Association Ads on the MMA of 2003

45

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Endnotes

52

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).

5On 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.

7See 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.

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.