Does Grassroots Lobbying Work?

Abstract

There are few reliable estimates of the effect of grassroots lobbying on legislative behavior. The analysis in this article circumvents methodological problems that plague existing studies by randomly assigning legislators to be contacted by a grassroots e-mail lobbying campaign. The experiment was conducted in the context of a grassroots lobbying campaign through cooperation with a coalition of groups lobbying a state legislature. The results show that grassroots lobbying by e-mail has a substantial influence on legislative voting behavior. The article concludes with a number of possible extensions of the study's design to other forms of lobbying and other problems in political science.