Detailed information on millions of US lobbying contracts starting in 2019.

What is LobbyingData?

LobbyingData is a U.S. lobbying data provider that transforms federal Lobbying Disclosure Act filings published by the U.S. Senate and House into a structured dataset built for research. The company applies proprietary parsing, entity resolution, and normalization methods to every filing, turning raw disclosure documents into clean tables researchers can actually analyze. Publicly traded client entities are mapped to stock tickers, and reported lobbying issues are tied back to specific bills and the agencies targeted.

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What academic researchers should know about LobbyingData U.S. lobbying data

The dataset on Dewey is U.S. Lobbying Data. It covers every federal lobbying contract filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act from 1999 to present, 1.6 million contracts in all, across 200,000 client entities, 13,000 lobbying firms, and 78,000 registered lobbyists. More than 44 structured attributes are derived from each filing, including client, firm, lobbyist, issue codes, bills referenced, agencies targeted, and reported expenditures.

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Why academic researchers choose LobbyingData on Dewey

Raw Lobbying Disclosure Act filings are messy. Names drift across filings, issue codes are inconsistent, and connecting disclosures back to companies or bills takes weeks of cleanup before any analysis can start. LobbyingData handles that work for you. Every client entity is normalized across filings, publicly traded clients are mapped to stock tickers, and issue areas are standardized so you can track policy domains consistently over 25 years of data. The ticker mapping in particular makes this dataset unusually useful for finance and political economy research. It pairs cleanly with BrightQuery for U.S. public company financials and employment, TenderAlpha for federal contract awards, and any equity or fundamentals dataset researchers bring alongside it.

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LobbyingData academic research ideas and use cases

Lobbying and stock returns. Because LobbyingData maps publicly traded clients to stock tickers, finance researchers can connect lobbying intensity directly to equity outcomes at the firm level. Productive questions include whether lobbying spend predicts abnormal returns around relevant legislative events, how investors react to shifts in a firm's policy agenda, and whether firms with persistent lobbying activity earn premiums over peers.

Political economy and policy influence. Researchers studying how money shapes policy can trace lobbying activity by industry, issue area, and time, then compare that activity against actual legislative and regulatory outcomes. Strong research threads include how healthcare lobbying intensity maps to Medicare rule changes, how energy sector spending correlates with environmental regulation, and whether defense contractor lobbying aligns with appropriations outcomes.

Corporate strategy and compliance benchmarking. LobbyingData lets management and strategy researchers compare firms within an industry on lobbying intensity, issue breadth, and policy choices. You can benchmark who lobbies on what, how those choices evolve around product launches or merger activity, and how lobbying strategy differs between incumbents and challengers in the same market.

Early signals and regulatory risk. Because lobbying disclosures often precede policy changes, the data can be used to surface emerging regulatory risk. Questions worth exploring include whether shifts in lobbying focus predict sector level regulatory action, how crisis events such as pandemics and financial shocks reshape lobbying priorities, and whether lobbying activity flags policy risk earlier than signals available through traditional financial data.

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Dive deeper with Dewey documentation

Detailed information on onboarding with Dewey, data partner details, and technical documentation on data access.

View documentation

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