Interest Groups and Lobbying

Pursuing Political Interests in America

Thomas T. Holyoke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429973284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Interest groups and lobbyists play a crucial role in how public policy is made in the United States' representative democracy. By helping citizens organize and pursue their self-interests in the political arena, interest groups and lobbyists are an alternative but very effective form of representation. However, the adversarial nature of interest groups often fuels voter discomfort with the political process. Interest Groups and Lobbying is an accessible and comprehensive text that examines the crux of this conflict. Pulling together two areas of interest group research (why advocacy organizations form and how they are able to gain influence in Washington) DC. Thomas T. Holyoke shows students the inner workings of interest groups in the United States. Using case studies to clarify and expand on the issues surrounding lobbying and group action in federal, state, and local government, Holyoke explores how we can use interest groups and their adversarial impulse to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

PART ONE

Origins and Structure

CHAPTER ONE

Interests and Interest Groups

What is an interest group? Would you recognize an interest group if one called you and asked for money? Or if you saw its logo on a fundraising letter? Perhaps you have seen the logo of the American Bankers Association on one of your local bank’s walls, and even suspected that it refers to some kind of organization representing banks and the people whose profession is banking. Checking ABA’s Web site would probably remove any doubt, for it says, “The American Bankers Association is the voice of America’s $13 trillion banking industry, representing banks of all sizes and charters, from the smallest community bank to the largest bank holding companies.”¹ The Web site also lays out a variety of problems the multitrillion-dollar banking industry apparently has with current government policy, and describes what ABA leaders are doing to convince lawmakers in Congress, the White House, and regulatory agencies to solve them. That sounds like lobbying, and you, like most people, probably associate lobbying with interest groups. If so, then the Center for Education Reform must also be an interest group: its home page says its purpose is to urge lawmakers to enact policies promoting consumer choice in K-12 education because that is what its supporters want.² Both the center and ABA represent a group of Americans who have needs and desires, what we call “interests,” that can only be fulfilled by changing public policy. It feels right to call them interest groups.

But what about the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which describes itself as a “nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to the long term preservation of Nantucket Sound”?³ Made up of residents of Hyannis, Massachusetts, along with their elected officials and civic associations, the alliance’s goal is to convince the Federal Aviation Administration to deny approval of a giant solar wind farm on the shores of Nantucket Sound. Does that make this environmental organization an interest group? What about the Trans Canada Company or the nonprofit organization Consumer Energy Alliance? From 2012 to 2013 both tried to convince President Barack Obama to permit the construction of the Keystone Pipeline to move oil from Canada to Texas. Or what about Bold Nebraska, which represents people who do not want Obama to approve the pipeline because it might pollute water in the underground Ogallala Aquifer?⁴ Are they all interest groups?

What about American Crossroads, organized under the federal tax code as a 527 nonprofit by President George W. Bush’s former advisor Karl Rove to raise money for conservative candidates in elections? Is it an interest group even though it does not appear to have any actual members? How about former House majority leader Dick Armey’s Tea Party–tied FreedomWorks, which organized resistance to President Obama’s 2009 health care plan? What about the Tea Party itself? Or any political party? Are they not interest groups because they try to influence policy by changing the ideological composition of elected legislatures rather than changing the minds of people already elected to those legislatures? Is Haliburton, a corporation subsisting on government contracts, an interest group because it aggressively pushes lawmakers to give them these contracts? Is BP Oil an interest group? Citibank? The United Way? What about Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District, a giant public agency that provides municipal water but also spends money to shape policy in the state legislature and battles other political groups such as the Mono Lake Committee for control of water resources? Universities solicit lawmakers for grants to fund large research projects. Are they interest groups too?

Defining Interests and Interest Groups

It is easy to identify members of Congress because the process of becoming one is clearly laid out in the Constitution. Regulatory agencies are also pretty easy to distinguish from other organizations because they are created by acts of Congress. Even political parties can be identified without too much trouble. Interest groups, though, are harder. In fact, scholars cannot even agree on what to call them. Is an “interest group” the same as an “organized interest,” “social movement organization,” “special interest group,” “private interest,” “pressure group,” “lobby,” “nongovernmental organization,” or “political organization”? Perhaps it would be easier to start by thinking about why some entities are not interest groups. Presidents and executive branch officials often pressure Congress to pass (or to not pass) legislation, and members of Congress try to pressure them in return, and they all try to influence the decisions of Supreme Court justices. These policy makers lobby in that they try to persuade each other to enact policies they desire, but they are not working for interest groups. They serve in institutions created by public law to formally make policies benefitting all citizens within their jurisdictions. They wield powers that flow directly or indirectly from the nation’s most fundamental law, the Constitution. So while government officials and lawmakers lobby each other, no government institution is an interest group. Apologies to the Metropolitan Water District.

Political parties are not interest groups either. Apologies to Democrats, Republicans, and all of America’s small third parties. Parties gain political power by trying to get enough of their members elected to office to command a majority and thus directly control lawmaking institutions. To do that, they need the support of a majority of voting citizens, which means trying to represent many different groups of people at once, often bitterly realizing that trying to represent everyone usually results in failing to represent anyone well. When we talk about an interest group, we refer to a singular interest. Each group represents one need or desire, or at most a few very closely related needs or desires, held by only a small number of people. Consequently, most interest groups cannot gain formal political power by electing their members to public office. They represent too few people. Whatever influence interest groups have in government, it is informal rather than formal.

Corporations are not interest groups either. They exist first and foremost to make a profit in the marketplace and return that profit to their shareholders, not lobby for government largesse and favorable policy. Nor do they represent any definable group of people with a common interest. Their shareholders might be considered constituents, but most of them are involved with the company to make money, not influence policy. Corporations often do wade into the political arena, usually because a change in policy (or lack of policy change) will have a direct impact on their financial bottom lines. Moreover, some corporate executives have tried to claim they actually represent the interests of their employees and customers, sometimes even persuading them to contact lawmakers on the company’s behalf, as Allstate Insurance did with its forty-five thousand employees in the 2011 fight over whether to raise the nation’s debt ceiling (Dash and Schwartz 2011) and as Caterpillar did when the fight happened again in 2013 (Yang and Hamburger 2013). CEOs, however, are not accountable to their employees and customers and thus cannot be said to represent them in the political process. The same is true of universities, hospitals, and similar nonprofit organizations. They are not interest groups. Apologies to Citibank and the United Way. Corporations and nonprofits do collectively employ more lobbyists in Washington, DC, than true interest groups (Salisbury 1984), but they tend to only lobby sporadically (Brasher and Lowery 2006). Real interest groups represent some portion of the public, not just their own leaders and CEOs.

Interest groups, then, are private organizations, not formal parts of the government. This is why they are sometimes called nongovernmental organizations. They primarily exist to provide informal political representation to citizens, usually by persuading lawmakers that it would be valuable to enact policies that help these citizens pursue strongly felt interests. A person’s interest is fundamental to their character and is often grounded in economic need, aspects of personal identity (e.g., profession, ethnicity, sexual orientation), perceptions of fairness and justice, desires to acquire or achieve, and even metaphysical beliefs and values including religion. More broadly, interests define a person’s perception of who they are and what they believe so strongly, so intensely, that its absence would change that person’s identity. They would be a different person without that interest. Interest groups are thus formal aggregations of people sharing the same interest.

American society is extremely diverse, and so the number of different interests that are felt intensely enough to motivate people to form an interest group is probably unknowable. Not every individual interest leads to a mobilized interest group, often only because there are not enough other people who share the same interest to form a group, or because people with similar interests are too geographically dispersed (though today this is not the barrier it used to be). Those who do find enough soul mates who share their interest, who believe the interest should be embedded in the nation’s laws (and thus also apply to everyone else), and who are willing to dedicate enough time and money might then form an interest group. This is the beginning of a workable definition of “interest group,” but further development requires exploring the concept of self-interest.

A Culture of Self-Interest

Interest groups only exist to represent their members’ self-interests. People join or otherwise support an interest group because they want it to advocate for policies that make it easier for them to pursue their personal interests, even though public policy is supposed to treat everyone equally. While some interest groups do claim to advocate for the public interest or common good rather than just the good of their members, that is still simply their point of view. Ask coal miners and users of energy from coal-fired plants in West Virginia whether the common interest is served when environmental laws force their mines to shut down, putting them out of work. Ask Louisiana’s shrimping industry if it is well served by offshore oil drilling that is supposed to make the United States energy independent even though oil spills kill marine life. Coal miners and shrimpers benefit from cleaner air and cheaper oil but are hurt by lack of income. Policy that serves one person’s idea of what ought to be true for everyone benefits only that person’s self-interest, often at the expense of somebody else’s self-interest.

Simply put, we create interest groups to help us further our personal interests through the nation’s lawmaking process. This should not be surprising. Our political and economic systems are based on the fundamental belief that everyone has a right to pursue his or her own self-interest, and that no one’s interest is more or less legitimate than anybody else’s. We expect our government to protect this right to pursue our self-interest, and we often look to public officials to help us out by enacting policy prioritizing our self-interest, even when it is harmful to a majority of other citizens. We may talk about the virtues of compromise and the public interest, but then we denounce our leaders as incompetent or corrupt when new policy in any way threatens our self-interest. Compromises are only “obvious” and “sensible” when they give us what we want. In other words, we recognize no public interest in our political system, only many individual interests that sometimes aggregate into interest groups. Could it be any other way?

Democracy and Interests in the Classical World

In her book Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980), political theorist Jane Mansbridge argues that it once was different, and how our political beliefs subsequently changed to make individual self-interest almost sacred tells us a lot about why interest groups are both numerous and legitimate in the United States today.

Smaller, simpler societies have common interests because their needs are general, even universal. Everyone must eat, drink, and have shelter. But as societies more easily satisfy these basic needs and become larger, more complex, and more affluent, other common interests become harder to discern. Common interests may even cease to exist as citizens become more concerned with their own idiosyncratic needs and desires, or find that they want the riches and pleasures others have. They become driven by the contentious pursuit of individual self-interest.

For instance, Mansbridge argues, members of prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups had no real concept of individual interests. Resources for survival were acquired together and shared together so that decisions for the group were made by consensus for the common good of the group (10). Of course, these tribes were very small and very homogenous. From birth to death people lived with the same tribe and spent nearly all of their time working with fellow tribal members to acquire the food and water they all needed to survive. Each person’s individual interest was the group’s interest because everyone had a common interest in survival (12).

Collective decision making in the common interest survived the birth of civilization and was central to democracy in classical Athens of the fifth century BCE. All Athenian citizens (men descended from citizens and who had completed military service) were expected to participate in the Assembly, where decisions were debated until the collective good was determined and policy was made by unanimous consent. What benefitted one citizen was assumed to benefit everyone, so unanimous consent was desirable and possible to achieve (Mansbridge 1980, 9). Politics, said Aristotle, was not about satisfying personal needs but the process of discovering the common interest (Graziano 2001, 108). Participation and deliberation should be every citizen’s way of life, not something to be opted out of. Those who did not participate were scornfully called “idiots” and, if we believe Aristophanes’s play The Acharnians, fined for not attending the Assembly.

Yet sometimes the Assembly had to fall back on majority rule because achieving consensus was impossible (Mansbridge 1980, 13). This was an important change from more primitive societies. Majority rule means there must be one or more minorities whose interests are so different that they cannot be persuaded to accept the majority’s view of the common good. In such cases there arguably is no common good, just conflict between the interests of the majority and those of the minority, with the latter getting hurt. These differences tend to emerge in larger, more affluent societies, Mansbridge argues (13), because enduring differences in wealth and privilege create different experiences and expectations—what is often called “social hierarchy” or a class system. Enduring differences between the wealthy, the military, and poorer citizens led to clashes of interests in the Assembly that ultimately weakened Athens. Pericles rose to power in 461 by promising the lower classes more political influence at the expense of wealthier citizens and more spending on public works (such as the Acropolis), but the internal divisions he created weakened Athens as it entered the disastrous Peloponnesian War with Sparta (Fornara and Samons 1991).

Pericles’s supporters and rivals acted more like political parties than interest groups because they sought power through elections, but it was the size, complexity, and affluence of Athens that made it harder to discern the common good and pushed it into factional conflict. This is p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: First Shoot All the Lobbyists?
• PART ONE: ORIGINS AND STRUCTURE
• PART TWO: LOBBYING AND INFLUENCE
• Glossary
• References
• Index