Are revolving door lobbyists more likely to come from the federal bureaucracy and the White House, or from Capitol Hill?

This a question addressed by a couple Monkey Cage contributors that was spurred by a comment by Nancy Pelosi in a recent appearance on the Daily Show.

- Click here for the post.

She claimed that most lobbyists - those who began their careers in government and used the revolving door to get a lucrative lobbying job - came from the executive branch, not the legislature.

The contributors happen to have studied the issue and found this not to be the case:

In new article, “Revolving Door Lobbyists and Interest Representation,” we categorize previous employment for 1,600 randomly selected registered lobbyists. Among them, 834 lobbyists had previously worked in the federal government, for a total of 1,495 government jobs, ranging from Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress down to congressional staff assistants.

So, what about Pelosi’s hypothesis? Are revolving door lobbyists more likely to come from the federal bureaucracy and the White House, or from Capitol Hill? About 65 percent of our “lobbyist-job” observations were in Congress, vs. only 23 percent in the bureaucracy, and 9 percent in the White House. (Note: some people may have worked in more than one position in Congress, so we count the “lobbyist-job,” not the lobbyist.)

When we account for people who held jobs in multiple branches of government, we find that congressional experience is by far the most common among lobbyists. More than three-fourths of the sample have worked in Congress. And, when we break these categories down by party — whether a lobbyist’s former employer was a Democrat or Republican — we find no clear partisan bias among revolving door lobbyists across categories. Lobbyists comes from both parties at an equal rate.

So, our data show the exact opposite pattern hypothesized by Pelosi.