How interest groups discern serious legislation from position-taking

Abstract Legislators have an incentive to use legislative introductions to take positions for constituents and donors and to encourage these audiences to believe that the legislator is active on issues that they care about. Legislators hold asymmetrical information regarding their legislative efforts, however, and may want constituents and donors to believe that they are more active on the issue than they actually are. We argue that access-oriented interest groups have the most incentive and capacity, relative to ideological groups and individual donors, to distinguish legislators’ actual legislative efforts from their cheap talk. We argue that there are several features of the legislative process that allow interest groups to discern more serious legislative activity from cheap talk: the type of legislation (significant, substantive, or commemorative; business vs. non-business), the stages of the legislative process through which the bill progresses, and whether the sponsor is a member of the majority party. Using Volden and Wiseman’s Legislative Effectiveness data and campaign donations from the Federal Election Commission from the 101–116th Congresses (1990–2020), we demonstrate that access-oriented political action committees (PACs) use their lobbying intelligence to align their contributions with indicators of a legislator’s effort.