Administrative agencies have undertaken an increasingly substantial role in policymaking. Yet the influence-seeking that targets these agencies remains poorly understood. Reporting exceptions under the Lobbying Disclosure Act allow many of the most powerful advocates to characterize their activity as lawyering, not lobbying, and thereby fly under the radar. Using agency-generated records on lobbying activity, financial reporting, and personnel databases specific to lawyers, as well as LinkedIn, we describe a vast subterranean world of regulatory influence-seeking that the social-science literature has (mostly) ignored. Regulatory lobbying is systematically different from legislative lobbying. It involves different kinds of people and different lobbying firms that bring specific forms of expertise and distinct networks. Our key findings about how regulatory lobbying differs include the following: (1) the regulatory lobbying sector is highly segregated from the reported lobbying sector, with many regulatory advocates failing to consistently register or report earnings commensurate with their activity level, (2) the number of unregistered regulatory advocates working on the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act plausibly exceeds 150% of the registered lobbyists working on that law, (3) the most effective regulatory lobbyists and law firms involved with regulatory lobbying have incomes that dramatically outpace leading reported lobbying firms (which are also mostly law firms), and (4) back-of-the-envelope calculations and more sophisticated decomposition regressions imply that aggregate expenditure on lawyer-lobbying is several multiples of reported lobbying spending. We introduce the case of a particular lawyer-lobbyist and provide a theoretical discussion to situate and contextualize these findings. Collectively, this work opens a window into neglected domains of politics and reveals an important and understudied form of political inequality.

Do demonstrations tend to deepen or endanger democracy? I examine this theme of major debate between scholars and among political actors, analyzing how the United States and other democracies have dealt with—and been shaped by—popular pressure on representative institutions. Cases that are discussed include Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, as well as examples drawn from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. I offer clear principles to differentiate between types of protest that deepen democracy, advance the goal of inclusion, and others that endanger democratic principles. Among the issues I take up is whether the location of protest—for example, adjacent to or even inside legislative chambers—is decisive. Rejecting that approach, my argument instead emphasizes the difference between protests intended to influence policy-making or the political agenda and those that use intimidation or violence to replace the primacy of elections in selecting office holders. The discussion argues that conceptualizing demonstrations as complementary to the work of representative institutions can help to promote the difficult to obtain objective of political equality between citizens. The article also asks whether consensus on this matter can be attained and if so how.

The combination of rigid policy rules with shifting political, economic, and social environments can produce drift: policy change without formal modification. We know much about the political origins and consequences of drift but little about the legal battles that accelerate or impede it. I identify two distinct forms of policy rigidity that generate drift: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Drawing from recent and historical cases encompassing voting rights, racial discrimination, religious conscience protections, and other hot-button issues, I argue that drifting policies possess several sources of legal resilience: injuries are difficult to identify; judges can be persuaded of the merits of restraint, textual formalism, and bright-line rules; and policy makers plausibly deny any intentional action in pursuit of controversial outcomes. Drift is not an automatic and unremarkable process of continual policy change but rather the outcome of high-stakes political and legal contestation over how rigid policy thresholds and categories should be adapted to meet shifting conditions.

Revolutionary protest rarely begins as democratic or revolutionary. Instead, it grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. If protest is not revolutionary at its onset, theory should reflect this and be able to explain the endogenous emergence of democratic demands. In this article, I combine multiple data sources on the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution, including survey data, an original event catalogue, and field interviews. I show that the correlates of protest occurrence and participation change significantly during the uprising. Using the Tunisian case as a theory-building exercise, I argue that the formation of protest coalitions is essential, rather than incidental, to democratic revolution.

While scholars have focused extensively on the consequences of partnerships between interest groups, less attention has been paid to the historical dynamics shaping when, how, and why such groups unite. This is especially true of “unexpected” partnerships, which unite groups with seemingly little in common. Such partnerships are important, as they can reshape to an unusual degree which actors, issues, and ideas “fit together” politically. We address the puzzle of how unexpected group partnerships form through case studies of previously non-existent alliances between labor unions and the gay/lesbian rights movement in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. Using these cases, we produce a theory arguing that unexpected partnerships are a product of a favorable political opportunity structure—present when each group experiences shared threats and mutual vulnerabilities—and the actions of entrepreneurial group leaders, who forge cross-group identities, accentuate shared ideological convictions, and build institutional ties.

Gun ownership is a highly consequential political behavior. It often signifies a belief about the inadequacy of state-provided security and leads to membership in a powerful political constituency. As a result, it is important to understand why people buy guns and how shifting purchasing patterns affect the composition of the broader gun-owning community. We address these topics by exploring the dynamics of the gun-buying spike that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was one of the largest in American history. We find that feelings of diffuse threat prompted many individuals to buy guns. Moreover, we show that new gun owners, even more than buyers who already owned guns, exhibit strong conspiracy and anti-system beliefs. These findings have substantial consequences for the subsequent population of gun owners and provide insight into how social disruptions can alter the nature of political groups.