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38 Legis. Stud. Q. 1 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/lgvessqy38 and id is 1 raw text is: Legislative Comparative ® Researnh Studies Quaerly ete Introduction On occasion, novel data are used to answer questions of interest to readers of the Quarterly. Such is the case with the lead article by Lee Drutman and Daniel J. Hopkins, who examine more than 250,000 inter- nal e-mails written by 151 senior Enron executives between 1999 and 2002. These messages were written without any expectation that they would someday become public, and they provide great insight into the ways Enron-a large business in the energy sector that would later collapse in spectacular fashion-thought about its political situation. The e-mails detail how members of the organization interacted with various governmental entities and officials. Paying particular attention to some 5,500 e-mails that focused heavily on politics, the authors report that far more of Enron's attention was devoted to what they term lobbying as active participation in policymaking than to lobbying as a transaction, or the distribution of campaign contributions in return for preferred policy positions. The majority of the messages focused on monitoring political events, while other significant chunks discussed various formal and informal interactions between business and public officials. Remark- ably few e-mails, just over 1%, discussed election-related activities. There is, of course, no expectation that these e-mails encompass all of the politically related activities pursued by an organization as large and as influential as Enron, but the unusual access afforded by these messages suggests that far more lobbying activity is directed toward the mundane routine of monitoring events and consulting on policy details than to the flash of campaign contributions. Another clever use of unusual data is presented by Eric D. Lawrence, who looks to see how the publication of Hinds' Precedents changed the behavior of U.S. House members in regard to their willing- ness to appeal decisions of the chair. Asher Hinds was the Clerk at the Speaker's table, another label for the House parliamentarian, from 1895 to 1911. (He resigned for an unusual reason: he had been elected to the House from a constituency in Maine.) While he served under Speaker Reed, Hinds began to compile the House precedents that had been set over the institution's history. The information he gathered was first pub- lished in 1899. Lawrence tests whether the publication of this vital information about parliamentary practices changed the way members behaved in response to decisions rendered from the chair. He does this by gathering data on appeals of the chair's decisions from 1879 to 1929. Making House precedents public significantly reduced the number of LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXVIII, 1, February 2013 1 DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12000 © 2013 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

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