Online Resource in Real Life
Author: Gabrielle Gies | Majors: Political Science and Psychology
My name is Gabi Gies and I am a senior political science and psychology student at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. I am working with Dr. Geoboo Song from the political science department to complete an honors thesis in political science. My thesis will analyze the potential correlation between campaign contributions from pharmaceutical interest groups and the voting behavior of elected representatives in the United States Congress.
My mother worked in a pharmacy from the time I was born to when I started college. Dinner conversations frequently included discussions of co-pays and over-the-counters, of prior authorizations and compounds. When I turned 16, I started working at the pharmacy and saw first-hand how access to affordable medication strongly impacts people’s lives, especially the negative effects when one cannot afford medication. The COVID-19 pandemic has further shown how important it is to have access to medical care in general, not just prescriptions. A minor illness in someone who doesn’t have proper healthcare access can quickly turn into something more threatening.
Much of American society is determined by our politics, including the prices we pay for medication. Politics, in turn, is widely believed to be subject to the will of those with the deepest pockets, rather than general interest of the public. In my Money and Politics class with Karen Sebold in Fall of 2021, we discussed that correlation of politicians’ interests or behavior with the financial contributions they received cannot be equated to causation. One may cause the other, or vice versa, or they may both be related to an unknown third variable. Regardless of direction, research drawing correlations between pharmaceutical interest group spending and congressional voting behavior is important due to the immense effects healthcare access has on society.
I met Dr. Song through another mentor of mine, Bri Huett. Dr. Song was Bri’s PhD mentor and Bri was my Volunteer Action Center advisor. After I switched majors in my sophomore year from biomedical engineering, she connected us to talk more about career opportunities and research within political science. Dr. Song has a significant amount of published work, focusing on public policy and perceptions of it. When I narrowed down my thesis idea to campaign finance and pharmaceutical legislation, I reached out to Dr. Song to talk about the feasibility of my idea and asked him to mentor me through the process.
This summer, I have focused on the literature review for my topic. I have focused on gaining an understanding of different types of financial support for political candidates as well as background on pharmaceutical policy. One of the largest tasks I need to accomplish for my thesis is defining the range of time or session of Congress I will examine. It will need to be a time with enough pharmaceutical-impacting legislation to gather data points, but not so many that data collection is impossible within my time constraints. I had hoped to narrow down this time period by the end of summer, but learned that research takes more time than anticipated. I have found several resources for my project, though.
The first is OpenSecrets.com, which I will use to collect data on financial contributions to individual congressmen. The data is from Federal Election Commission data, which has been sorted by the interest group that made the contribution into sectors, with the sector of interest being Health. The website shows how much individual congressmen received from each industry within a sector, by election year. This is the data I will use for pharmaceutical lobbying data.
Determining the time period based on legislation has been more difficult. The Library of Congress, which I happened to visit over the summer for fun (pictured below), is dense with records. Many pieces of legislation don’t have a clear effect on pharmacy – determining if they actually relate to pharmacy requires reading more of the details than just a quick search, especially because many large bills cover multiple areas and pharmacy is a side-effect of the core actions of the legislation. However, knowing the key phrases to search and the tags to include or exclude in my search will help with this process. I am hopeful that I’ll have a time period selected by mid-September.
Overall, this research process has been rewarding. Transparency in government is important and this project will help with that. My reading skills and analysis have grown over the summer as I work on the literature review. I have learned how to synthesize information from an article’s abstract and determine if it is helpful for my research, as well as how to summarize methods and results within my annotated bibliography. My next steps include choosing a time period – I am currently leaning toward a session within the Obama presidency due to his administration’s focus on healthcare, which would affect pharmaceuticals. I have a meeting set up with the campus librarians to talk about my progress and any other advice they have for navigating Library of Congress records. My goal is to have all of my data collection and analysis done by the end of the semester to focus on potential conferences in the spring.