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Field experiments have increasingly been used to study political phenomena, including the influence of various factors on policymaking. This case study discusses an attempt to study the influence of constituent contacts on state legislator voting behavior, with special attention to some ethical and practical concerns in field experimental studies of policymaking.

There are few reliable estimates of the effect of grassroots lobbying on legislative behavior. The analysis in this article circumvents methodological problems that plague existing studies by randomly assigning legislators to be contacted by a grassroots e-mail lobbying campaign. The experiment was conducted in the context of a grassroots lobbying campaign through cooperation with a coalition of groups lobbying a state legislature. The results show that grassroots lobbying by e-mail has a substantial influence on legislative voting behavior. The article concludes with a number of possible extensions of the study's design to other forms of lobbying and other problems in political science.

AbstractDo policymaker perceptions reflect actual citizen needs? A vast literature has explored the extent to which policy is responsive to public opinion, but there is little systematic work on policymaker perceptions of social problems. We quantify social problems with a unique dataset of the number of phone calls placed by citizens to a free service that connects Michigan residents to service providers. We combine these data with a survey of local policymakers' perceptions of social problems facing their own city shows, consistent with theories of bounded rationality, that policymakers use heuristics to make judgments about the extent of constituent needs in their city, and that policymaker perceptions reflect the prevalence of needs. However, partisan perceptions of needs diverge, with Democrats consistently perceiving greater needs than Republicans. There is no evidence that policy activity on the needs in the sample is responsive to constituent needs. We conclude with implications for theories of policy making and avenues for future research.

There is persistent debate about who most influences the federal appointment process, especially whether the executive branch staffs the federal bureaucracy with individuals loyal to the White House or relies on the process as an accommodation to important political players, especially members of Congress. Yet, people still know little about the role members of Congress play in the process of shaping the prenomination environment In this article, the authors address this debate by using unique archival data from the Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford Presidential Libraries to identify which legislators contacted the president about a specific nomination or appointment request and under what conditions these requests were successful. The authors find that legislator resources, Senate membership, and those closer ideologically to the president are related both to the number of requests made and to the number of successful appointment or nomination requests granted. The results suggest that the president relies on members of Congress for credible information about staffing administrative positions, but they appoint or nominate individuals that are in their own interest, not necessarily to accommodate Congress. Adapted from the source document.

There is persistent debate about who most influences the federal appointment process, especially whether the executive branch staffs the federal bureaucracy with individuals loyal to the White House or relies on the process as an accommodation to important political players, especially members of Congress. Yet, people still know little about the role members of Congress play in the process of shaping the prenomination environment. In this article, the authors address this debate by using unique archival data from the Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford Presidential Libraries to identify which legislators contacted the president about a specific nomination or appointment request and under what conditions these requests were successful. The authors find that legislator resources, Senate membership, and those closer ideologically to the president are related both to the number of requests made and to the number of successful appointment or nomination requests granted. The results suggest that the president relies on members of Congress for credible information about staffing administrative positions, but they appoint or nominate individuals that are in their own interest, not necessarily to accommodate Congress.