THE BUSINESS OF LOBBYING IS RELATIONSHIPS

Adapted and edited from an original article entitled 'The Relationship Market: How modern lobbying gets done' Authors: Maggie McKinley and Thomas Groll, Center for Ethics, Harvard University, USA.

The business of lobbying is relationships, and the daily life of a lobbyist is focused on perfecting and implementing the art of relationship building. Lobbyists spend a portion of each workday in relationship building practices. These practices include interactions with lawmakers or their staff, usually initiated by the lobbyist, or providing electoral, legislative, or personal support. The overwhelming majority of lobbyists are usually the initiator of most interactions with lawmaker offices. In building a relationship with a lawmaker and staff, lobbyists often find challenging the delicate balancing act between contacting an office often enough to maintain a relationship and contacting an office too frequently. Respecting the time of a lawmaker and staff, is paramount to relationship building. Accordingly, lobbyists engage in a range of relationship building practices from least to most intrusive based on context.

The most intrusive relationship building practice is setting and attending formal meetings with lawmakers and staff.

In addition to simply making contact with lawmaker offices to signal and remind of ongoing relationships, lobbyists build relationships also by providing legislative support in the form of policy reports, draft statutory language, private information and data regarding constituent clients, inside political and legislative information, and lobbying support to gather cosponsors or rally defeats. This support provides an opportunity for a lobbyist to demonstrate trustworthiness and dependability with the goal of building solidarity.

Lobbyists also provide personal support to offices, and to staffers in particular, in building relationships. Personal support, most often takes the form of advice or information provided to staffers regarding career advice or advice regarding other personal life choices.

In addition to building and accessing established relationships, lobbyists also engage in a range of practices focused on preserving established relationships. Most notably, lobbyists are keen on preserving their own professional reputation, especially with respect to honesty. Not only do lobbyists feel that it is important to actually be honest within the profession, but they also feel that a lobbyist must aim to always be seen as honest and will invest incredible energy into preserving a reputation for honesty. That means verifying information extensively before providing it to a lawmaker’s office and also being wary of representing clients that would provide unreliable information. In a lobbying market focused on relationships and information, having a reputation for credibility can help preserve established relationships as well as assist in building new ones.

Relationships, once established, are readily commodified. During each stage of the lobbying business process from new client pitches to contracting with clients to strategy planning with colleagues and coalitions relationships are treated as highly valuable goods that the lobbyist can convert into time with the lawmaker or staffer with whom the lobbyist has a relationship.

In the context of new client pitches, lobbyists present a substantive policy proposal and legislative strategy to potential clients. But, in order to convey the feasibility of the legislative strategy, they also stress the fact that they or their firm have the relationships necessary to put the strategy into action. Clients and lobbyists then codify the relationships into contracts, which include promises to secure meetings with particular offices or to enact a legislative strategy necessarily dependent on those relationships.

Strategy meetings between lobbyist colleagues focus similarly on relationships: many lobbyists develop strategy sessions centered around a spreadsheet that lists the names of necessary contacts for legislative action. Strategy meetings first focus on brainstorming which lawmakers’ names to list as possible contacts, which includes researching each lawmaker’s voting record and personal and political background. Once the list of names is compiled, the strategy meeting then turns to identifying those lobbyists, if any, who held a pre-existing relationship with lawmakers listed on the spreadsheet. If a lobbyist held a relationship with a lawmaker, then the attendees would list the lobbyist name adjacent to the lawmaker name. If no lobbyists held a relationship with a lawmaker, because it is generally assumed too difficult to form a relationship with a lawmaker quickly, the hired lobbyists might turn to third parties for support, including hiring sole practitioner lobbyists or other firms, or turn to coalition partners for support. Sole practitioner lobbyists often focus on relationships with particular lawmakers or a certain subset of lawmakers. Once assigned to a particular lawmaker on the spreadsheet, that lobbyist will then have the responsibility of converting that relationship into access.

The contract lobbying market has become a market for relationships, rather than a simple market that trades influence for policy, and these relationships yield greater access to the lawmaking process for clients who can afford to leverage the lobbyist’s relationships.

The real influence in Brussels begins with the ability to build and maintain relationships in order to gain access to the scarce resource of lawmakers’ time. If entrenched groups with the resources to establish and maintain the relationships necessary to gain access can monopolize lawmakers’ time, they will also narrow the issues about which the EU institutions hear and narrow the information that the EU institutions  receive about those issues.

Recognition of lobbying as a relationship market has clear implications for future reform efforts with respect to lobbying regulation. Rather than designing lobbying law to deter quid pro quo arrangements only, future reform efforts should take the relationship market into consideration when designing regulatory regimes. Recognition of the relationship market could allow future reform efforts to take these inadvertent consequences into consideration when designing lobbying regulatory policy.

Lobbying is essential to the functioning of the European Parliament, particularly when MEPs are attempting to gauge the impact of policies on specific sectors. Interest groups’ provision of information and technical expertise to MEPs often ensure more informed policy formulation. While the European Commission often spends 3-4 years preparing a proposal with advice from a large number of expert and high-level groups, a rapporteur in the EP has only a few months to prepare a report. Hence, committee rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs are particularly obvious lobbying targets and often lean heavily on interest groups for information when writing reports. These MEPs are also considered to be the main opinion-shapers of Parliament’s stance as a whole. Much of the Parliament’s work involves highly technical issues, where expert knowledge is required. MEPs manage with few assistants and policy advisors, who are not necessarily experts on the dossier under consideration. MEPs have an extremely busy agenda and spend most of their time living out of a suitcase travelling between Strasbourg, Brussels and their national constituency. Lobbyists are therefore welcome guests in the offices of busy MEPs. Most MEPs, assistants and parliamentary policy advisors cannot imagine doing their work without information provided by lobby groups. Rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs in particular rely extensively on interest groups to provide them with information and to translate complex and technical information into brief ‘digestible’ notes. Parliament’s extensive workload gives considerable scope for lobbyists to influence MEPs, assistants and policy advisors. When drafting the committee reports, rapporteurs routinely seek out key interest groups to solicit their views.

Tips for effective lobbying (Source: Friends of the Earth)

1. Identify your target and formulate clear, realistic demand

• Who are you going to lobby? Who has the power to achieve your campaign aims? Who do you have access to who has the power over the people who have power
• What can that person do?
• What is their stance on the issue? What are they realistically going to do? What barriers are there? Can other individuals/groups offer support?
• What are you going to ask them to do? Simply expressing your opinion won’t change anything. Ask for something specific

2. What you can ask your MEP to do?

• Generate a public list of supporters for an issue
• Provide a commitment to which MEPs can be held in the future
• Ask a Parliamentary Question (written or oral)
• Table an amendment to a proposal at the report stage
• Ask your MEP to pass on your concerns to the European Commission.

3. Face to face lobbying

Before the meeting

• Meetings are normally only 10-15 minutes long. They are usually quite informal. It’s really important that you focus the discussion on three key messages, backed up by a few statistics. Don’t let the decision maker avoid making a commitment or agreeing to your demands by steering you away from these.
• Make sure you are well prepared and briefed on the issue. However, unless the issue is one of your MEP’s main interests you will know far more than they do.
• Decide on whether you will make individual appointments or go together as a party (normally not more than 3 or 4). Get together before hand and decide which aspects of the issue each of you will concentrate on, so that the discussion does not focus on one spokesperson.
• It is often a good idea to have one person just observing the conversation and making notes, and only entering it if the discussion is wandering off course or getting a little too heated.

During the meeting

• Ask the decision maker to do something specific.
• Give them a reason to act. Is it a moral issue, can you demonstrate mass public support? Think about a dual 'carrot and stick' approach. What's in it for them (positive media coverage, being held in high esteem by constituents and other key stakeholders) and what consequences of not acting should they be afraid (mounting local concern about the issue, you have the press on side etc.)
• Take brief notes on what the person you are lobbying is saying. Keep a record of anything they agree to.
• If you are a group, don't disagree with each other as it detracts from your message.
• Offer to send further information on any point of particular interest to the person you're lobbying.
• Take along any briefing material you feel is suitable to give to your MEP.
• Remember that the way you communicate your message is almost as important as what it is. Consider appearance, body language. Be confident and assertive but stay calm and polite.

After the meeting

• Write a short letter to tahnk you your MEP for seeing you.
• Keep up the dialogue- react to events and campaign initiatives with further letters bringing to their attention developments and news stories.
• If the MEP has agreed or refused to do something see if it is of interest to the media.
• As with letter writing, if you don't get the response you want, be persistent. As with letter writing/email lobbying, encourage others to visit them too, or organize a public event or action to demonstrate the support your cause has.
• Share your expereinec and advice with other local groups.