Unlocking lobbying data in Massachusetts

Legislata was founded on the belief that information in public policy should be more accessible and usable.

Lobbying in Massachusetts is a place where this is about as true as it gets. Every lobbyist is required to file extensive disclosure forms twice a year, but those forms are buried on thousands of individual webpages, making it hard to put together a holistic picture of the industry in the Commonwealth.

So we collected that data and made some of the most relevant statistics freely accessible. There’s:

how much each lobbyist donated to candidates,
how much each candidate received,
every individual campaign contribution from Jan 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024,
each individual lobbying activity, including what bills were lobbied on and to what elected officials,
client spending in 2023 and the first half of 2024, and
the top 50 lobbyists by earnings in 2023 and the first half of 2024.

Access all the data

Below are a few things we noticed while compiling the data, though we encourage everyone to look at the total data and draw your own conclusions.

There are a lot of lobbyists and many earn far more than legislators

There were more than 1,500 lobbyists registered with the state in this legislative session. That means that for each legislator, there are nearly 8 lobbyists.

*Histogram of lobbyists by compensation (those with less than $50,000 in compensation removed so as not to overly extend the graph)*

The median lobbyist earned $16,160 from lobbying in 2023. Clearly, your typical lobbyist is not living below the poverty line, so this means that most people registered as lobbyists earn the bulk of their income elsewhere and not from “official” lobbying for clients. This may, for example, include someone working at a company that is the registered lobbyist on their behalf or someone who does it as part of a portfolio of other communications work.

Nonetheless, those who are paid as full-time lobbyists can be paid very well.

There are nearly as many lobbyists earning more than then median state representative as there are members of the legislature, and about 90 that earn more from lobbying than the House Speaker and Senate President. Many are former legislators, now earning considerably more than they used to - some more than half a million dollars per year.

Who are the clients?

There were more than 1,400 organizations who spent money on lobbying this legislative session. The top names would be familiar to anyone who works on Beacon Hill, with the Mass BioTech Council taking the top spot in 2023 and the first half of 2024, followed by the Mass Teachers Association and the MMA.

As with lobbyist earnings, there is a power law in effect, with the median client spending $45,000. Yet that still leaves nearly as many clients spending more on lobbying than the average representatives earns as there are members of the legislature.

Campaign contributions

*Some of the highest receivers of lobbyist donations*

All campaign contributions made by lobbyists must be disclosed, which is great. Not all lobbyists use the same naming of candidates - Karen Spilka is listed in 16 different ways (Karen Spilka, Committee to Elect Karen Spilka, CTE Karen Spilka, etc) - which is less great for quick analysis.

Above are the top receivers based on matching the names to donations. We see that the top are what you might expect from anyone interested in what’s happening with the legislature. The Senate President, House Ways and Means Chair, and Governor take in the most donations. The Speaker of the House is much lower than what you might expect, but it could be that there are other committees for which he fundraises, or that most of his fundraising efforts go towards his members.

These contributions are not evenly spread out over the course of the year. Both in 2023 and 2024, there is a spike in the late spring. Why that happens is beyond the data, but I’m always open to hearing from those in this world why they think they may be.

The level of donations is an interesting question and open to interpretation. On the one hand, it could be seen as a significant amount - tens of thousands of dollars for some elected officials. On the other hand, it may be considered a refreshingly low amount. Sen. Spilka raised more than $600,000 in this legislative cycle according to OCPF, so the amount from registered lobbyists was less than 7% of her total contributions.

Access the data

Overall takeaways

I encourage everyone to look at the data themselves. There’s a lot that is disclosed and you may notice something that jumps out based on your contextual knowledge. Here are some of the high-level conclusions we could draw on first look.

This is a significant industry, but not huge

Having 1,500 registered lobbyists and 1,500 clients for a 200-person legislature may seem like a lot. But that’s fewer than some individual companies in the area. And when filtering out those who are not full-time lobbyists (based solely on their earnings), it’s likely that many of the most established lobbyists have the time to develop good relationships with the legislature over a number of years. Plus, it seems that those relationships are not based on campaign donations, since they represent a small fraction of overall campaign financing, but on working on a number of issues for different clients each session, with a particular focus on the budget.

Lobbying doesn’t guarantee legislative wins

The top-spending client, by a long way, was the Mass BioTech Council. Yet that did not prevent the Senate from offering lower incentives in its economic development bill which didn’t pass by the end of formal session.

The data is incomplete but still very useful

Massachusetts requires a healthy amount of disclosure from lobbyists about their activities. But this push towards transparency is stymied by the nature of Beacon Hill legislating. The bills most lobbied on were the budgets, which contain so much policy that they can touch on nearly everything. More detail, as always, would be welcome for those trying to understand the conversations that are happening.

Yet the data is still very useful if you’re a prospective client. Many of the disclosure forms include which elected officials interact with which lobbyists. If you know that there is a particular representative or senator you’ll need to convince on an issue, this data can show you who they may have a good relationship with. Or if there is a particular issue you want to make sure your potential lobbyist is an expert on, you can look at their past clients to see if they’ve ever worked in that area.

Lobbying stats highlights the relatively low pay of elected officials and staff on Beacon Hill

Of the top ten earning lobbyists in the first half of 2024, nine had previously served as legislators or staffers. All are now earning more than double what the Speaker of the House did.

Legislata is a non-partisan policy intelligence platform, so we don’t take sides on issues. But as people committed to democracy and good governance, it raises concerns that the people we ask to work on our behalf could earn significantly more money by leaving public service. There are about 75 people who in 2023 earned more from lobbying contracts than any member of state government, including the House and Senate leadership and the governor.

How long can we expect talented people to stay in a tough job, with perhaps a difficult commute, when every day they see people walking around the State House who used to be in their shoes and are now in a higher tax bracket?

Even though questions about lawmaker salaries are in the news and the Senate has taken steps to raise staff salaries, the existence of high paying jobs that rely on the same expertise should be seen as a competitive threat to retaining the most talented public servants.

We believe that the public conversation should revolve less around the question of “how much are they paid” and more around the question of “how much should they be paid to keep them from looking elsewhere?”