Toward the end of When Cities Lobby, Julia Payson sets up a blunt normative question: “Are we willing to accept that certain communities might benefit disproportionately from lobbying if it means granting a stronger voice to cities of all types” (p. 126)? This trade-off is not an obvious or hypothetical one. Payson builds it out of key results from clear, careful, and concise positive work focused on two key questions: When do cities lobby? Does it work? At least where financial transfers are concerned, Payson shows that hiring lobbyists allows blue cities in red states like Charlotte, North Carolina, to overcome some representational challenges, and that investing in lobbying pays off multiple times more for the most privileged municipalities like Beverly Hills, California (p. 110). These issues, previously underappreciated ones about local governments hiring lobbyists to pursue their interests with other governments, are especially critical against a backdrop of urban-rural political divides and deeply embedded representational challenges for denser parts of the country (e.g., Jonathan Rodden’s work).

When Cities Lobby is about a practice that is understudied by scholars and often invisible to the public (e.g., p. 131). In breaking new ground (and then some) on this practice, Payson makes clear the connections between intergovernmental lobbying and broader questions about interest groups, political geography, federalism, and distributive politics. Indeed, Payson makes a strong case that while city lobbying has been overlooked when compared to the robust literature on corporate interest groups, studying cities offers some real advantages and leverage on interest group questions, whether or not one is interested in local government. Municipalities are more transparent about their decisions and one of their goals, fiscal transfers, is more measurable than other plausible lobbying outcomes in other contexts.

These empirical advantages have their own practical limitations—or at least they did before Payson came along to construct the remarkable dataset upon which the book is built. While city lobbying expenditures and fiscal transfers are observable and objective, each state has its own disclosure rules and data availability. Payson has exhaustively unified 50 states worth of data, some of which just post loads of individual filings (p. 13) and merged in other key political and economic indicators. She skillfully supplements the critical but least common denominator, outcomes available in all 50 states, by taking advantage of the richness and opportunities that state-by-state disclosure quirks provide. She does so to provide robustness checks and investigate mechanisms. For example, she takes advantage of extensive documentation in Missouri to summarize the percent of lobbying meetings a city has with its own district representatives (p. 59).

Payson first takes on the “when” question by building and testing theory about cities’ proclivities to spend on lobbying. She draws on insights from the corporate lobbying literature, and on ideas about federalism, representation, and political geography. She supplements with her own qualitative work—interviews with lobbyists and local officials—to generate a number of predictions. She finds patterns consistent with extant (noncity) interest group work. She then layers rich political and political science topics atop the already rich political science topic of lobbying to generate theory about the unique aspects of intergovernmental lobbying. She focuses on variables such as the number of state representatives with districts overlapping a city, the partisan alignment of the city and its state representatives, and the professionalism of the legislature. Throughout this section, Payson fuses theory and empirics, and seamlessly mixes relatively simple correlational analyses with more sophisticated causal ones. For example, she shows a strong correlation between the number of representatives a city has to work with and the probability of a city lobbying, and she exploits redistricting induced changes to examine the effect of gaining more representatives. Here and elsewhere, the analysis is presented in a clear and accessible way with a heavy reliance on figures. All the modeling work in the book is in appendices. Another presentation strength that manifests throughout is the use of quotes and insights from interviews with lobbyists and leaders. Rather than have one qualitative chapter in which all the interviews are collected, Payson weaves them in “just in time” to add color, clarity, and concreteness.

Payson then turns to whether city lobbying works. She nicely situates her analysis in the broader literature’s efforts to assess whether “money buys votes” (or anything else). In Payson’s case, the question is whether money buys more money. She shows that city lobbying works on average for cities, except it also frequently doesn’t work, and it works much better for the wealthiest cities. Here again, the findings are compelling thanks to clear presentation, careful explanation, and supplemental analyses (e.g., a placebo test showing no effect on federal transfers). Throughout, Payson is attentive to the potential selection issues that could threaten her inferences, and she demonstrates plenty of idiosyncrasy in lobby decisions. Payson’s overall efficacy finding joins recent work on corporate lobbying that also shows an economic return, contra some earlier work which did not find effects on votes. The variance in efficacy provides a sensible explanation for why cities don’t all lobby all the time. The equity finding feeds the core normative trade-off with which Payson concludes the book and with which I began this review.

Put together, it adds up to being the book on intergovernmental lobbying and a great contribution to the broader field of interest group politics. More than that, When Cities Lobby makes contributions about representation, federalism, and political geography. The punchline is that cities hire lobbyists to make up for the fact that in some instances their state representatives are not sufficiently delivering. The optimistic read is that a routine political tool can help overcome the overlap of political and geographic polarization. Of course, there are plenty of reasons for pessimism too—for example, the fact that such lobbying is necessary in the realm of transfers, let alone policy. Additionally, Payson’s tremendous dataset stops in 2015, so there is good reason to expect that the underlying dynamics are now even more challenging for cities.

As a good book should, When Cities Lobby leaves us with questions to explore. Two of the biggest are “what about policy?” and “why do rich cities get five times the return on their investment?” Payson takes on both questions, but these discussions are understandably less developed than the core analyses in the book. For example, she shows that a rich city’s advantage is not the result of spending more or hiring more effective lobbyists, and she raises some likely explanations but does not have the data to cleanly pin them down. Likewise, she marshals some brief case studies about policy preemption. The book is a great contribution even if it is limited to the relatively easier case of transfers. However, in future work Payson and others could focus on the messy question of policy impact, which is at least as tied to the fundamental representation issues. The affluent cities issues is critical because of the key trade-off that Payson describes. As an optimist I hope affluent cities’ disproportionate lobbying success is at least partly attributable to a learnable way to play the game and not solely an indicator of another intractable structural inequality. Either way, emblematic of the book as a whole, it is a well-documented and important finding with resonance for scholars with a variety of interests.