Lobbying Reconsidered

Politics Under the Influence

Gary Andres, Paul Hernnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317346661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Lobbying Reconsidered: Politics Under the Influence, reveals how lobbying is a complex process that involves more than just relationships, friends, access, favors, and influence. This book offers a broader perspective on this important dimension of American public policymaking. As a person who straddles the worlds of Washington insider and interest group scholar, author Gary Andres hopes to use his experience and insight in in the lobbying world to help readers navigate beyond the conventional wisdom, and guide them to a deeper, broader understanding.

CHAPTER
1

INTRODUCTION

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Potential Client: All I need is someone to make one call to Karl Rove at the White House. He can fix my problem.

Lobbyist: That’s not what you need; it’s not what we do; and, it won’t fix your problem.

Potential Client: I thought that’s what lobbyists did?

Lobbyist: Only on TV.

The lobbying industry suffered a black eye in 2005 and 2006 after prosecutors punched so-called influence peddler Jack Abramoff with a flurry of felony charges ranging from fraud to tax evasion. In the months leading up to his conviction, the press overflowed with sordid stories about lavish dinners and exotic trips hosted by the former lobbyist. Accounts dripped with quid pro quo innuendo, painting a disquieting picture of how private interests play the so-called influence-peddling game in Washington. Insider access gleaned through personal connections, campaign contributions given in luxury skyboxes, and feting lawmakers with lavish meals, expensive gifts, and five-star travel were the tools of choice. Congressmen and staff allegedly responded by providing special favors, inside information, and earmarked pork barrel spending. Hollywood central casting could not have chosen a more prurient depiction of the K Street influence peddler. A screenplay must be next.

But these broad brushstrokes paint a false picture. This book draws a different portrait. By “getting under the influence,” I demonstrate that both academics’ and the media’s view of lobbying are far too narrow. What lobbyists do, as well as how and why they do it, deserves reconsideration. Moreover, many of the best-intentioned “reforms” of lobbying or other attempts to “open up the system,” often empower, rather than tame, the interest-group beast.

The media’s focus on the Abramoff affair masks the true face of the advocacy world. Lobbying is changing, and its transformation represents a major—and misunderstood—current in the American public policy process. Like the difference between the Soap Box Derby and the NASCAR, the advocacy industry has grown steadily bigger, increasingly complex, and more prevalent, serving as a significant engine in both policymaking and electoral politics. This book examines the evolution of advocacy and develops a more complete storyline of how and why it has changed. It also investigates the lobbying industry’s often overlooked structural and tactical complexities, offering a more realistic assessment of interest-group impact on public policy and some predictions about where the advocacy enterprise may move next. Finally, this book highlights some of the unintended consequences of the changing rules of the interest-group universe.

The lobbying industry is now big business. In 2006 there were over 30,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, twice as many as six years earlier. This doesn’t even count the legions of media consultants, Internet advocacy advisors, pollsters, grassroots specialists, and political action committee managers who support the enterprise but do not register to lobby.¹ Monthly spending on lobbying more than doubled between 1999 and 2005.² But that is only the tip of iceberg. If we look “under the influence,” an even bigger, dynamic industry exists. Some argue the total number of individuals involved in the advocacy business tops 100,000, with combined spending on all these activities of $8 billion annually.³ A bigger lobbying industry neither guarantees better public understanding nor the political omnipotence of interest groups. Despite its burgeoning size and growing presence in the public policy process, lobbying is still a mysterious and enigmatic practice, often wrapped in the soft stereotypes of Gucci loafers rather than hard facts.

A BROADER PERSPECTIVE ON LOBBYING

In order to better understand lobbying, we need to place it in a broader context – focusing on what these advocates do, as well as how and why they do it. This book draws upon several earlier strands of scholarly work that place lobbying in a broader context. These new lenses will help readers develop a clearer and more realistic view of why the advocacy world looks the way it does today, the motivations underlying the behavior of lobbyists, and the role they play in policymaking.

Studies of interest groups—their structure, behavior, organizational challenges, and power—have a long and venerable history in political science. But much of this older perspective is narrow and incorrectly shapes our views of the real world of lobbying. Scholarly interest in this research agenda ran hot and cold during the twentieth century. Much of the impetus behind it sought to prove political power was not concentrated in a power elite.⁴ What emerged was a school of thought called “pluralism,” which argued policymaking was fragmented, or plural, and neither subjugated nor controlled by a dominant few.⁵

But pluralism also had its detractors. And while researchers rejected the notion of a single power elite, critics argued that the pluralist model—while good in principle—was undemocratic in practice because of challenges related to organizing citizens to act on their interests, imbalances in what moved on to the political agenda, and policy control by narrow, unrepresentative interests in certain policy areas.⁶

Most media accounts, and as a result many ordinary citizens, seem stuck in a view of lobbying heavily influenced by pluralist critics such as E.E. Schattschneider (The Semi-Sovereign People), Grant McConnell (Private Power and American Democracy), or Theodore Lowi (The End of Liberalism). All argued forcefully that private interests dominate the American public policymaking process. These groups, and their lobbyists, demand particularized benefits such as tax breaks, pork barrel spending, or favorable regulations. And, because of their expertise at exploiting the levers of power, or setting the agenda, they usually “win.” In this zero sum, closed game, the “public interest” suffers. As another scholar noted, “In a nutshell, what they (critics of pluralism) argued was that private interests, many of them rather narrow, dominated much of the American polity. Public policy had no authentic public-interest rationale and instead was the handmaiden of private power.”⁷

Pluralism also assumed that as long as all groups competed fairly and everyone was represented—much like classical economics—the “influence market” would reach some type of fair and optimal equilibrium.⁸ But critics noted a series of “market failures,” including barriers to entry, imperfect information, lack of competition, and even monopoly power by some advocacy organizations. One review of interest-group literature put it this way: “Rather than promoting democracy through conflict and competition, groups came to be seen as a drag on the democracy.”⁹

But while the detractors of pluralism make some valid points, their critiques of interest groups suffer from limitations as well and don’t fit very well with the modern world of lobbying. For example, there is an implicit tone in much of this writing that lobbyists never fail and therefore have too much influence. Critics of the pluralism model also take a rather static view of policymaking, assuming the players and issues in a closed government policymaking process (what they call “subgovernments”) rarely change. Yet in the real world, the process is more dynamic. The critics of pluralism also cannot account for the rapid growth in the lobbying world and why interest groups continue to invest resources even in losing efforts. Finally, these theories are not very helpful in predicting why different level of resources and tactics are deployed in various policymaking circumstances.

This book also demonstrates that lobbying is less omnipotent than some of the older interest theorists and the press suggest—principally because of the many changes in the lobbying environment laid out in the next several chapters. Combining these two thoughts, I argue that even though the advocacy industry has grown, it is not necessarily more effective. The prowess of lobbyists and interest groups can vary a great deal over time and in different policy settings.

Moreover, it isn’t necessarily always the case that the public interest and private interests represent a zero-sum game. Sometimes benefits for socalled private interests can benefit the public interest too.¹⁰ And a corollary to this view is that more lobbyists or a bigger advocacy industry does not translate to more private power. A host of checks and balances mitigate the power of the advocacy industry, but these are limits not widely understood by conventional wisdom among scholars, the press, or the public at large. A bigger, more institutionalized, tactically varied advocacy industry does not imply more power for lobbyists or benefits for the interests they represent. Lobbying power is more nuanced, conditioned by circumstances such as the type of policy under consideration, the partisan nature of the issue, and its visibility as well as the level and skill of advocacy resources deployed.

John Kenneth Galbraith developed the term “countervailing power” during the 1950s. He argued that one way to control monopoly power of one part of a market was to develop monopoly power in another. You could offset the power of sellers by promoting a countervailing power among buyers.¹¹ Or as applied to lobbying, promoting increased union power could offset growing corporate dominance. And while Galbraith was heavily influenced by the post–World War II context of expanding corporate and union dominance in the U.S. economy, one part of his argument still rings true. Lobbyists often mobilize and try to create “countervailing power.” But even Galbraith’s useful concept has limitations in the real world of lobbying. In today’s highly fractured, public, and indeterminate policy world, these moves are always undertaken with great uncertainty. As we shall see, attempts to build countervailing power under conditions of uncertainty often lead to major lobbying activity and investment, often with less influence and accomplishment than suggested by the media or critics of the pluralist model.

Surprisingly, despite decades of debate among scholars in this field, what lobbyists actually did remained largely a mystery. One expert noted that political scientists were startled to learn scholars paid very little attention to lobbyists, despite volumes of research on interest groups. Until 2002, he wrote, “no one had ever followed lobbyists through their daily activities and simply charted who they talked to and what they talked about.”¹²

So in many ways, these earlier strands of political science research were incomplete and often contributed to public misunderstanding about lobbying. Yet despite some of these omissions, there are several strands of scholarly thought and research that do help organize our thinking about the advocacy world and provide perspectives that guide the remainder of this book.

First, interest groups’ environments matter. Changes in interest groups’ external challenges lead to shifts and adjustmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Foundations of Lobbying
• Chapter 3 The New Advocacy Industry—Growth and Institutionalization in the Lobbying World
• Chapter 4 Governmental Growth and the Advocacy Industry
• Chapter 5 Partisanship and the Advocacy Industry
• Chapter 6 Lobbying in a Hyper Media Age
• Chapter 7 The new Lobbying Toolbox
• Chapter 8 Lobbying and Strategic Choices
• Chapter 9 Lobbying Reconsidered
• Index