Guest Author
About 1 in 20 non-budget bills passed both chambers during Florida’s 2019 Legislative Session. So how much do lobbying efforts actually impact the likelihood of these bills passing?
At Sachs Media Group, we wanted to find out.
Some bills are never really lobbied because they’re just that good — no controversy, no need.
Others are scarcely lobbied because they have no chance.
And not every bill generates lobbying to get it passed; some of the most effective lobbying is to kill bills. So you might not necessarily expect to see a strong relationship between lobbying activity and bill passage rates, since the presence or absence of lobbying can mean very different things.
Yet our analysis suggests a strong, affirmative relationship between how much a bill is lobbied and whether it passes. Bills (and their companions) that passed both chambers averaged 27 lobbying appearances, while those that died generated just 9 appearances on average.
Another way to view this is to bracket lobbying activity into different levels. This approach yields an even clearer view of how lobbying efforts relate to passage rates.
The overall passage rate of bills this session was 5.5 percent. Among those that had zero lobbying appearances logged, the passage rate was just 2.5 percent. This rate steadily increases to 3.5 percent for bills that had 1 to 9 appearances … 8 percent among those that had 10 to 19 appearances … 9.5 percent among those with 20 to 49 appearances … 15 percent among those with 50 to 99 appearances … and finally, 23 percent among those with 100 or more appearances.
In other words, the odds were 40-to-1 against a bill that wasn’t lobbied at all, but almost 4-to-1 for those that had over 100 appearances — close to 10 times better.
The take-home message? The more feet on the ground to lobby an issue, the better the chances it will cross the finish line.
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Karen Cyphers Ph.D. is vice president of Research for Sachs Media Group.
