WHAT WE GET WRONG WITH LOBBYING

Author : Lee Drutman, a Senior Fellow at New America and the author of  The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Poloticized and Politics Became More Corporate.

Original Text has been edited.

"The implicit understanding of politics is that the “special interests” and their lobbyists “buy” politicians. The problem with this view is not only that is it wrong, but also that it misdirects us. In short, it asks us to analyze politics without the actual politics –without the competition between competing interests, without the shifting alliances and coalitions, without parties and ideology, without any sense of there being a policy process, and without the many unpredictabilities and uncertainties that make politics actually interesting. It asks us to analyze transactions between individual politicians and individual special interests, as if they were separate and independent events (they are neither) that can be described as either “corrupt” or “not corrupt” (a useless dichotomy).

In so doing, we miss the bigger and more important story. The real story is not that lobbying or special interests are inherently bad. We have had them as long as we’ve had politics. The problem is that one set of interests routinely overpowers the rest. In particular, corporate lobbying has metastasized over the last four decades, and this increasingly over-crowded and hyper-contested lobbying environment benefits the large corporations who have the most resources to participate in the day-to-day workings of government.

The reason to hire lobbyists is that genuine political influence is actually hard work. It requires building a compelling case and then making that case over and over and over again. It means being in multiple places at once. But in the slow churn of the “war of position,” relationships are being maintained. Coalitions are being built. Worldviews are being reiterated. Legislation is being drafted and vetted. Carefully selected constituents are being brought in to tell carefully rehearsed stories. People are talking to other people, trying to figure out who will do what, what ideas are “serious” and “not serious,” what has a chance of moving, what isn’t going anywhere, what the press will cover, what voters might care about, and countless other attempts to shape the “common knowledge” at national or European level.

The most active participants have many different goals they’d like to achieve: some long-term, some short-term. Major lobbying entities are investing in many possibilities, engaging in “spread betting” can more than justify a decade of government relations for a large corporation. Often, the main goal is keeping an issue off the agenda.

Lobbyists gain access because they have personal relationships with members or staff. Or because they have useful policy information or analysis – an especially valuable resource for young staffers. Or because they just keep showing up.

While considerable empirical work finds that there is no consistent correlation between money spent on outcomes in any given case, it would be a tremendous mistake to then conclude that resources are irrelevant. The key is to understand resources in the aggregate. More resources allow you to hire more lobbyists, to work on more issues – to do more of everything. Looking at lobbying in the aggregate, what jumps out is the stark imbalance in resources. Corporations blow everyone else out of the water.

Even if we take the most benign view of lobbying as merely providing information and legislative support, on many issues, policymakers hear significantly more often from one side than another. To hire more and more senior and connected people, to be in more places, to make more and better arguments on your behalf with more detail and build more and more high-impact allies improves one’s chances. How much? It depends. But, on average, it’s not zero.

This growing imbalance has two major effects on the political system.

First, it is increasingly difficult to challenge any existing policy that benefits politically active corporations. Though corporate lobbying has become more ambitious and more aggressive over the years, the top priority for most corporate lobbyists is still preserving the status quo.

Second, the sheer amount of lobbying has created a policymaking environment that now requires significant resources to get anything done. Which means that, with increasingly rare exceptions, the only possible policy changes on economic policy issues are those changes that at least some large corporations support.

This state of affairs is not inevitable. But the key point is that we need to move past the overly simplistic questions about whether or not money “buys” votes or whether or not our politics are “corrupt.” These either/or questions are not only unanswerable; they also shift our focus away from seeing the system as a whole – a necessary first step toward making it work better."