Which bills are lobbied? Predicting and interpreting lobbying activity in the US

Slobozhan, Ivan, Ormosi, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6472-6511 and Sharma, Rajesh (2020) Which bills are lobbied? Predicting and interpreting lobbying activity in the US. In: The 22nd International Conference on Big Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery(DAWAK2020). UNSPECIFIED, pp. 285-300. ISBN 978-3-030-59064-2

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Abstract

Using lobbying data from OpenSecrets.org, we offer several experiments applying machine learning techniques to predict if a piece of legislation (US bill) has been subjected to lobbying activities or not. We also investigate the influence of the intensity of the lobbying activity on how discernible a lobbied bill is from one that was not subject to lobbying. We compare the performance of a number of different models (logistic regression, random forest, CNN and LSTM) and text embedding representations (BOW, TF-IDF, GloVe, Law2Vec). We report results of above 0.85\% ROC AUC scores, and 78\% accuracy. Model performance significantly improves (95\% ROC AUC, and 88\% accuracy) when bills with higher lobbying intensity are looked at. We also propose a method that could be used for unlabelled data. Through this we show that there is a considerably large number of previously unlabelled US bills where our predictions suggest that some lobbying activity took place. We believe our method could potentially contribute to the enforcement of the US Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) by indicating the bills that were likely to have been affected by lobbying but were not filed as such.

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: lobbying,rent seeking,text classification,us bills,theoretical computer science,computer science(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2600/2614
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > Norwich Business School
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Responsible Business Regulation Group
Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Competition Policy
Related URLs:
Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 28 Aug 2020 00:15
Last Modified: 20 Apr 2023 18:37
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/76702
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-59065-9_23

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