Interest Groups and Ideas: The Battle Over Housing Finance in the run-up to the Financial Crisis

his dissertation examines the relationship between interest group access and American policymaking in three papers. Paper 1 suggests a key mechanism for interest group influence is in the opportunity for campaign contributors to frame information and dominate the belief diffusion process in congressional committees. The paper proposes hypotheses around the impact of interest group access on belief diffusion in a committee-level social network. It then employs social network analysis and Correlated Topic Modeling to determine whether members of Congress with the same interest group donors develop statistically similar cognitive maps with respect to a complex policy issue.;Paper 2 examines the relationship between the complexity of the industries the Congress must regulate and the demand for lobbyist expertise in the Congress. Paper 3 focuses on the causal mechanism that translates campaign contributions into public policy. It tests theories of vote-buying against access-based theories head-to-head. The common thread between these three papers is the evidence that interest group influence is, in fact, a socio-psychological process in which interest groups shape the intellectual environment that acts upon members of Congress and their staffs. These findings are in conflict with strong versions of the theory of legislative subsidy and theories of vote-buying.;Papers 1 and 3 draw their content from Congressional hearings on the structure of the American housing finance system prior to the Financial Crisis of 2008. This debate occurred as underwriting standards were declining across the mortgage finance industry and credit risk was accumulating at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The result was a...