The Social Process of Lobbying

Cooperation or Collusion?

John C. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317928249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Despite a wealth of theorizing and research about each concept, lobbying and norms still raise a number of interesting issues. Why do lobbyists and politicians engage in cooperative behavior? How does cooperative behavior in lobbying affect policy making? If democratic participation is good, why do we view lobbying as bad?

Lobbying engenders debate about its effects on the political process and on policy development. Sociologists and other social scientists remain concerned about how norms emerge, the content of norms, how widely they are distributed, and how they are enforced. Political scientists study how interest groups work together and influence the political process. Based on the experience of the author, a former lobbyist, this book looks at the social norms of lobbying and how such norms work in a general framework of other norms and legal institutions in the political process. In developing this argument, John C. Scott claims that:

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• Embedded social relationships and trust-based social norms underpin everyday interactions among policy actors.

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• These relationships and norms have concrete impacts on the policy making process.

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• Social relationships and norms inhibit participation in the political process by outside actors.

The investigation is conducted through an innovative theoretical framework, combining existing theoretical perspectives from different disciplines, and using a variety of data and methods, including longitudinal quantitative and social network data, interviews with lobbyists, activists, and policymakers, and anecdotal and historical examples.

The Social Process of Lobbying provides refreshingly new empirical evidence and theoretical analysis on how networks of trust are neither all good nor all bad but are ambivalent: they can both improve policy and fuel collusion.

1
Lobbying

But I had a client come up to me. I was talking about, I gave a little speech about lobbying reform and how it’s not getting done. It’s pretty unbelievable it’s not getting done given what happened earlier this year. And the guy came up to me afterwards and said—now I represent his association—he said to me, “I guess since you represent our association, I assume you are one of the good lobbyists, not one of the scum lobbyists.” I said, “Yeah, that’s me.” “And why aren’t people like you lobbying to get lobbying reformed?” And I almost had to say, “Because no one’s paying me to do lobbying reform.”

—Interview with the author

A Walk Along K Street

A short walk along K Street in Washington, D.C., is as good a place as any to begin a chapter on lobbying. Standing on the corner of K and 10th Streets, the first thing one would notice would be the construction activity as new, gleaming high-rise office buildings with lots of chrome and glass were being constructed in several places. Many of these buildings will be occupied by lobbying organizations—more on that in a bit. But after acclimating one’s senses to this bustle, one would also notice a small retail and office building at 1001 K Street. The building, which was built in 1926, was the former headquarters of Local 132 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners. Many unions established their headquarters or significant offices in Washington, D.C., for the purpose of attaining legal recognition of the right to organize, bargain, and strike over working conditions. In 1935, during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which was the first major federal law permitting union organizing on a large scale. In the decades that followed, Congress, the courts, and the executive agencies generally expanded the rights of organized labor. But unionized industries began their decline in the 1970s, and a Reagan administration hostile to the unions limited the rights and gains of organized labor. Looking at the Painters’ Union building now, it is perhaps symbolic that the current resident is a tourist trinket shop that sells many items made overseas. The only evidence of its prior history is the cornerstone (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Carpenters Union Building at 1001 K Street, Washington, D.C.

Heading west, the Asbury United Methodist Church is on the southwest corner of 11th and K Streets. Founded in 1836 by seventy-five free and slave African Americans, Asbury is one of the oldest African American churches in Washington, D.C., and has counted many of the city’s community and civil rights activists among its members. Churches like Asbury formed the backbone of many movements, from women’s rights to civil rights to peace movements, and these church-based activists used their proximity to the hallways of Congress and executive branch agencies to press their claims (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Asbury United Methodist Church at 11th and K Streets.

Another stop a few blocks away is at 1625 K Street, the site of the notorious ‘little green house.’ The little green house was the Washington, D.C., apartment and entertainment center of Attorney General Harry Daugherty in the Harding administration (1921–1923). Daugherty, a political crony from Harding’s home state of Ohio, often entertained the president, members of the cabinet, and other Ohio political and business associates—known colloquially as the ‘Ohio Gang’—with all-night poker and drinking at 1625 K Street. At these sessions, Daugherty was reputed to have colluded with political loyalists in the sale of pardons and immunities from prosecution. The intimacy of this setting also enabled Albert Fall, Secretary of the Interior, to convince President Harding to transfer large tracts containing oil reserves in the Western states from the Department of the Navy to his own Interior Department. Oil company interests then were able to lease these reserves at little cost in exchange for bribes to Fall, Daugherty, and others in the Harding administration in what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. The little green house, which today has been replaced by an office building, probably gave birth to the impression of K Street as a den of corruption. More recent scandals refer to the street: The ‘K Street Project,’ for example, was an arrangement in the 2000s in which Republican congressional leaders pressured lobbying firms to hire Republicans, who in turn contributed to the campaign funds of GOP members of Congress.

All along our walk, we have passed existing modern office buildings or new ones in the process of construction, which we first noticed when we started from the former Carpenters Union building. Washington, D.C., has seen a veritable building boom in office space in the downtown area. As a real estate analysis notes, office space in downtown Washington, D.C., is more expensive than in Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles on a per-square-foot basis (Brooks, 2012). Of course, not all the office space is reserved for lobbying organizations as there are a large number of private firms that supply services to the federal government. However, as I will discuss later in the chapter, the boom in construction activity is matched by a boom in the number of lobbyists at the federal level (see Figure 1.3).

Like any other urban street, K Street is a dense space of buildings, people, and infrastructure, but our walk showed a diversity and history related to lobbying. Our popular conception is of lobbyists as well-dressed professionals in new office buildings. But lobbyists are also, among other things, activists in pursuit of civil rights, advocates for labor rights, and self-interested actors solely seeking personal gain.

Figure 1.3 View of K Street construction.

This chapter discusses the origins of, and context for, lobbying in the U.S. A central argument of this chapter is that lobbying is deeply rooted within American democracy as it complements the formal processes and institutions of government. In addition, the particular qualities of physical proximity and social relationships mark the process of lobbying.

The discussion begins with the question, what is lobbying? The next section focuses on the how lobbying came to be in its present form with a particular emphasis on institutional factors that facilitated lobbying as well as institutional responses to lobbying. Lobbying and indeed other forms of political participation are rooted in ancient political rights. Whereas lobbying is open to all and is constitutionally protected, the distinction between insider and outsider has mattered for influence purposes since the earliest days of the U.S. government. The chapter concludes with short overview of popular perspectives on lobbying that reinforce this insider-outsider distinction.

What is Lobbying?

Lobbying is a process that encompasses a number of activities, some of which occur simultaneously. Principal elements include researching and analyzing legislation or regulations, monitoring and reporting on developments, attending congressional or regulatory hearings, working with coalitions interested in the same issues, and then educating not only public officials but also the media and general public as to the implications of various changes (Nownes, 2006).

If we were to ask Mary, our fictional lobbyist, what she did in a typical day, she might say, ‘meetings.’ After getting to her office around 9:30 a.m. and checking emails and voicemails, Mary will probably spend some time getting ready for the next meeting on her schedule. Mary spends a significant portion of her day setting up meetings with other lobbyists, her association’s members, and with policy makers. She is then out at meetings or running conference calls from her office or the association’s conference room. In between these meetings, she might stop to chat with other lobbyists or make some calls from the taxi on the way back to the office. At the end of the day, she writes up some talking points for an upcoming visit to Capitol Hill or a summary of a new bill that’s been introduced that will be posted on the association’s website. Or she might head back up to the Hill for a committee hearing, at which she will take notes, get a word in with a busy staffer, and trade gossip with other lobbyists.

Both in the descriptions and in my thumbnail sketch of Mary’s day, there is the flow of communication. It is the job of lobbyists like Mary not just to stay on top of the flow but to direct it as well.

So, we have a broad range of activities, but how do we define lobbying? A number of definitions exist: Under section 308 of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, any person “who shall engage himself for pay or for any consideration for the purpose of attempting to influence the passage or defeat of any legislation by the Congress” must register under the lobbying disclosure rules.¹ According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2013), a lobby in a collective sense refers to those “who frequent the lobbies of the House [of Commons]” or, in the U.S., “the persons who frequent the lobby of the house of legislature for the purpose of influencing its members in their official action.”²

As noted in the Introduction, no standard definition of lobbying exists in the academic literature (see the discussion in Baumgartner and Leech, 1998), but the various definitions are similar enough that we can choose one. Berry (2001: 9001) defines lobbying as “the effort of organized interests to inform policy makers and persuade them to choose particular policy choices.” The term ‘interest’ is not simply any value but rather “arises from the conjunction between some private value held by a political actor—public officials, or groups thereof as well as private sector operatives—and some authoritative action or proposed action by government” (Salisbury, 1994: 12). Organized interests then engage in communication efforts: “The most general way to state the nature of the lobbyist’s job is to note that he must in some way communicate with governmental decision-makers” (Milbrath, 1963: 115).

Influence is the other part to Berry’s definition, and is part of many other definitions, but influence itself evades clear definition. In modifying Baumgartner and Leech’s definition (“an effort to influence the policy process”), Nownes suggests that lobbying “is an effort designed to affect what the government does” (2006: 5). So, communication and intent to influence, but not actual influence, are both necessary and sufficient for a definition of lobbying.

Focusing on definitions casts a wide net on activities but still misses some key elements, and highlighting these elements necessarily narrows the focus of this book. One key element in lobbying is physical presence.³ The term itself refers to one who is waiting outside the doors of the decision makers. Pasley (2002) picks up on this idea by defining lobbying as “when some group or individual, typically a private economic interest seeking benefits or protection, makes its case personally to government decision-makers, often but not necessarily through some sort of specially deputed emissary” (59, emphasis original). Nownes notes that lobbying is a complex phenomenon that takes a variety of forms. In illustrating these forms with four examples, he uses a common phrase—‘meets personally’—in each example (Nownes, 2006: 2–3). The importance of personal presence is highlighted by the testimony of the lobbyist Sam Ward, speaking in 1875:

To introduce a bill properly, to have it referred to the proper committee, to see that some member in that committee understands its merits, to attend to it, to watch it, to have counsel to go and advocate it before the committee, to see that members of the committee do not oversleep on the mornings of important meetings, to watch for the coming in of the bill to Congress day after day, week after week, to have your men on hand a dozen times, and to have them as often disappointed; to have one of those storms which spring up in the Adriatic of Congress, until your men are worried, and worn, and tired, and until they say to themselves that they will not go up to the Capitol today—and then to have the bird suddenly flushed, and all your preparations come to naught—these, these are some of the experiences of the lobby.

(Byrd, 1991: 496–7)

The physical presence of lobbyists often translates into personal relationships that channel communication and influence. Rothman (1966) relates the following example from the Gilded Age: “Herbert Terrill, agent for the sugar refiners, explained that he discussed [tariff] rates only with friends; with others ‘I presumed my views would not have had much weight’” (205). Corporations disliked high turnover in Congress, relates a senator in the 1890s, because their lobbyists could not form stable connections to members (Rothman, 1966).

Another element involves representation. Lobbying can be on behalf of one’s self, such as when a person seeks a public pension or a position in government.⁴ In the early Congresses, it was not unusual, as in the English manner, to receive petitions and then pass acts that implemented that particular petition.⁵ But by the early to mid-nineteenth century, lobbyists more frequently were agents on behalf of other persons or interests as the flood-waters of requests to Congress continually rose.

Representation highlights the relationship of lobbying to the broader processes of politics and policy. Thompson highlights the importance of representativeness in her definition of lobbying, which is the process by which the interests of discrete clienteles are represented within the policy-making system: “Lobbyists, then, can be defined as representatives who act concurrently with, and supplement the capabilities of, those who are selected at the polls” (1985: 140). This idea will be discussed more further on, but lobbying is so durable in this democracy because lobbyists are representatives of cross-cutting affiliations, groups, and even of specialized knowledge. By the 1890s, for example,

Agents typically answered the inquiries of interested Senators, explaining the various proposals on the calendar and clarifying the pertinent but dull details of intricate bills. With regularity, they supplied information that only representatives of particular organizations could gather. Helping members of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Lobbying
• 2 Communities
• 3 Working Together
• 4 Setting the Lobbying Agenda
• 5 Reputations for Influence
• 6 Trust
• 7 Norms as an Institution of Lobbying
• 8 Lobbyists, Norms, and Public Policy
• Appendix
• References
• Index