Understanding the Relationship Between Health PACs and Health Lobbying in the American States

Rachel Weiss at the National Institute on Money in State Politics for her assistance in procuring the data for us and helping us understand it. We examine whether and how health PAC activity in the states is connected to lobbying. Is the political money that health interest organizations bring to the policy process a powerful, independent means of influence or is it better understood more narrowly as a lobbing tactic used to support lobbying? We examine a range of conjectures on the relationship between campaign contributions and lobby activity and the limited work that has been conducted on them and raise a number of questions about the process by which they are connected. We test these hypotheses with 1998 data on state lobbying and PAC activity. We conclude that PAC activity is best viewed as an adjunct of lobbying rather than an independent form of political activity