State lobby registration data: The anomalous case of Florida (and Minnesota too!)

Florida's lobbying community was anomalously large in 1990, a problem that threatens to undermine more general interpretations of the density of state interest systems. We use time series and cross-sectional data to better understand just what happened in Florida. Two explanations are examined, one focusing on changes in lobbying regulations, and the other based on a population ecology interpretation of Florida's battle over the sales tax on services and what should replace it. The data provide circumstantial support for the latter account, which suggests that Florida is anomalous only in the extremity of the conditions governing the size of its interest community in the late 1980s, not the conditions themselves.