Measuring Interest Group Positions on Legislation: An AI-Driven Analysis of Lobbying Reports

Special interest groups (SIGs) in the U.S. participate in a range of political activities, such as lobbying and making campaign donations, to influence policy decisions in the legislative and executive branches. The competing interests of these SIGs have profound implications for global issues such as international trade policies, immigration, climate change, and global health challenges. Despite the significance of understanding SIGs' policy positions, empirical challenges in observing them have often led researchers to rely on indirect measurements or focus on a select few SIGs that publicly support or oppose a limited range of legislation. This study introduces the first large-scale effort to directly measure and predict a wide range of bill positions-Support, Oppose, Engage (Amend and Monitor)- across all legislative bills introduced from the 111th to the 117th Congresses. We leverage an advanced AI framework, including large language models (LLMs) and graph neural networks (GNNs), to develop a scalable pipeline that automatically extracts these positions from lobbying activities, resulting in a dataset of 42k bills annotated with 279k bill positions of 12k SIGs. With this large-scale dataset, we reveal (i) a strong correlation between a bill's progression through legislative process stages and the positions taken by interest groups, (ii) a significant relationship between firm size and lobbying positions, (iii) notable distinctions in lobbying position distribution based on bill subject, and (iv) heterogeneity in the distribution of policy preferences across industries. We introduce a novel framework for examining lobbying strategies and offer opportunities to explore how interest groups shape the political landscape.