WHAT CAN BE TAUGHT IN PUBLIC POLICY ADVOCACY

There are three different sets of skills or abilities essential to the business of public policy advocacy that can be taught: knowledge, communication and messaging and relationship building.

1. Knowledge

The most obvious contribution of the classroom to students wishing to be lobbyists is knowledge, both factual information and knowledge on how to leverage what they know to advance their careers. It is not possible to teach anything about the idiosyncratic personalities of the people involved in lawmaking, but a great deal can be taught about the structures of government and how officials in government work within a complex web of rules and norms. This is labelled process learning. The more lobbyists know how policies are really made and executed, the better they are at influencing them and the more they are valued by others wanting to be influential.

How to comply with lobbying laws and regulations also can be taught, and is a part of process learning. Lobbying rules and regulations may not be perfect, but they can provide students with an entry point into a discussion of ethnical norms and expectations about professional behaviour.

Students can also be taught about specific areas of public policy. This is labelled policy learning. It is in the interests of would-be lobbyists to take these courses. Lobbyists are valuable to lawmakers and other lobbyists because they are experts on particular areas of public policy, as well as how government works. Many spend large portions of their careers working in one or two policy areas, most of which are exceedingly complex, with intricate statutes which are then implemented by codes of administrative rules. University-based courses in different areas of policy can give students a leg up in the job market. Learning something about an area of policy, presumably one interesting to the student, thus becomes as important for a lobbying curriculum as learning about the rules and norms at national or EU level. This also opens doors to incorporating lobbying education into other courses in political science and across university curricula where departments of education, criminal justice, and health sciences and business schools teach about public policy.

In addition, business schools may find value in teaching lobbying, especially as corporate managers need to learn that businesses are only successful in politics when they earn broad public support. Moreover, corporate managers need to be prepared to deal with significant changes in how their interests are represented; corporations once relied heavily on associations to lobby on their behalf, whereas more recently they have become much more likely to establish their own presence.

We also know that the research processes and data interpretation have become increasingly important in advocacy and lobbying. Lobbying firms increasingly hire economists and statisticians to craft the set of facts they use to advocate for policy change. If lobbyists and their research staff are doing policy analysis for MPs, or MEPs, political science departments may need to boost the research methods and quantitative reasoning parts of their curriculum to improve analytical learning.  Masters programmes, in particular, may be ripe for courses focusing on the kind of applied data analysis useful for lobbying, with an emphasis on the graphical presentation of analysis and how to produce so-called ‘infographics’ that visually represent complex ideas.

Different kinds of knowledge are not just a suite of tools lobbyists use in their work, they are the products lobbyists sell. Knowledge is power, and whoever has it is valuable to others. Political science professors have long known that the truth about access and influence in politics is that lawmakers grant it to lobbyists who know things they do not know or are otherwise difficult and costly to learn. Indeed, the whole theory of access and influence in politics is built on the assumption that lobbyists know more about structure, content and process than lawmakers, and as lawmakers need to know these things they invite lobbyists into their offices to act as counselors. This is why new MPs, MEPs tend to hire certain types of lobbyists on their staff. Smart, knowledgeable lobbyists also attract the attention of other lobbyists. To the extent that coalitions and networks are important in the field of lobbying, individual lobbyists are more attractive to other potential coalition partners if they bring to the table information the others lack but badly desire .The more students focus on learning the intricacies of government structure and functioning, the intricacies of specific areas of policy, and the art and use of data analysis and presentation, and the better job faculty do at teaching it, the better job prospects students are going to have when they enter the advocacy job market.

2. Communication and Messaging Skills

The second area of lobbying that can be taught to a significant degree is communication. Lobbying is not only about being a trusted provider of information; it is also about formulating and delivering effective messages. Those who win political conflicts are the ones who do the best job at framing issues, presenting them to lawmakers and the public in ways that appear sensible and consistent with broadly held social values . With the Brussels community becoming ever more crowded with advocates, effective framing and messaging is an increasingly crucial skill to have. A whole industry of public relations consultants is emerging to do it, to a considerable extent pushing aside traditional lobbyists who are more comfortable in backrooms. Fortunately most of these skills can be taught.

Part of what needs to be taught, of course, is basic writing competency, a skill even many undergraduates do not master prior to graduate school. Good grammar and the ability to write clearly and concisely, sometimes with carefully crafted nuances, are absolutely essential to the success of any advocacy campaign. If a political message is long, awkward, rambling and otherwise painful to decipher, it will never be read. Only the most persuasive and catchy writers using good grammar are going to get their messages through to lawmakers and their overworked staff. Students must learn to write well.

Concise messaging strategy is also a must, and can also be taught. Time is a precious resource in politics, and the less time lawmakers and staff have to spend learning what a lobbyist is trying to say, the more likely they are to read a message and remember it. Not all classroom writing has to be long term papers. Courses in political communication and public relations often emphasize very short writing assignments. Getting to the point fast, with as few complicated words as possible. Leaving a clear message for the reader and then ending the communication. Try even to fit it in a message sent on Twitter.

Not only must lobbyists have good grammar and the ability to write concisely under pressure, they must also be able to write persuasively. Of course the entire point of lobbying is to persuade someone to take an action the lobbyist and the people he/she represents, desire. A good message needs to let the lawmaker know quickly that the action the lobbyist wishes them to take is in their interests, perhaps because it will endear them to a constituency crucial to re-election, or one crucial to election to higher office. It must also be a message the lawmaker, or even the lobbyist if it is hard to get lawmakers to listen, can take to the public.

Writing must also connect audiences. Much of the public tends to be uninformed and quiescent, so lawmakers pay them little attention . Part of a lobbyist’s job is to make certain their group members or clients do not fall into this category. They need to keep the people they represent informed and engaged. Lobbyists, after all are really just professional go-betweens, agents acting on behalf of principals in the public, even if they often do so with a significant amount of autonomy and discretion. Thus a good message should not only move lawmakers to want to serve the constituency the lobbyist represents, but to get members excited about pressuring the lawmaker into doing it. Most of this can be taught. However, the writing norms learned in a doctoral programme may not overlap with the expectations of a lobbying firm. Political scientists might consider re-training to improve the teaching of professional writing. In other field, such as law and medicine, there is a long tradition of mandatory continuing education to update skills.

Just as methodological skills are maintained with short courses on the newest statistical techniques, the same approach may be needed to better teach about effective writing for lobbying.

Good political communication and messaging is not just content and quality, it is also effective targeting and delivery. Generally speaking, people involved in interest groups are more likely to contact their lawmakers than people who are not , but some methods of communicating are more effective than others under particular circumstances and the means of delivery often shapes the type of message delivered. When is it best to use Facebook or other types of social media? When to use email? When to have members and clients go old-school and write letters and make phone calls, and when to actually bring people to the nation capital or Brussels for personal meetings or hold a ‘lobby day’?

Even e-petitions are becoming somewhat more precise in terms of what constituencies are mobilized and which lawmakers their opinions are targeted at. If an issue important to association members is about to be voted on, the lobbyist may want to quickly tell members, and provide them with a message they, in turn, can send to their representative in Parliament through the internet. If possible, the lobbyist can help members personalize the message before they email it, post it to Facebook, or tweet it because personalized messages are far more effective than duplicate messages . If the lobbyist’s group or clients are known and trusted by the legislator, his or her staff may regularly monitor the group’s website or Facebook site, which makes communicating this way quick and easy. Many MPs, MEPs offices have a staff person who spends at least some of his or her time going through the Facebook sites of interest groups the office considers important to read. On the other hand, if an organization is trying to gain the attention of lawmakers because they are new to politics or are otherwise marginalized, the lobbyist may be well advised to stay old-school and encourage members or clients to telephone their lawmakers or to visit the nation capital or Brussels as these make a personal impression on lawmakers. What faculty can do for students is teach them which method of message delivery is most appropriate given the political circumstances surrounding an issue. There is a growing body of research on the practical dimensions of digital politics and organizing on which this  instruction can be based.

Another aspect of communications and messaging that can be taught is the value of follow up. Grassroots advocacy, real or virtual, is generally used to get the attention of lawmakers so that a foundation is created allowing the lobbyist or a few especially motivated members to meet with key lawmakers . That means lobbyists for the interest must personally follow-up while the message communicated from the grassroots is still relatively fresh in the minds of targeted lawmakers. Even more entrenched interests not needing large-scale grassroots advocacy will still often signal to a lawmaker’s office that an issue is important to them by having a prominent member of the organization, who is also a prominent person in the lawmaker’s constituency, call first.

This at least suggests that when it comes to targeting messages, it is often best to have interest group members and clients target their own elected officials. Showing the constituent connection always helps a lobbyist make a case because MPs, MEPs at least say that nothing persuades them like communications from constituents, especially when that communication contains a personal story from the constituent connected to the issue at hand.  Students can be taught these new kinds of best practices in messaging, just as they can be taught other little bits of wisdom. For instance, they can be taught to stay away from certain kinds of allegedly grassroots-oriented technology, like the e-petition companies which do nothing more than send worthless identical messages to Parliament and may be more interested in selling the contact information of the people who sign such petitions .

3. Relationship building

Although knowledge and communication can be taught, the third area, relationship building, starts to straddle the line between what can and cannot be taught. The value of relationships, and how to maintain them, can be taught, but some of what is needed for knowing how to build relationships perhaps cannot be because it is too much a part of an individual’s personality. Who the lobbyist knows is very much a part of measuring his/her value in the nation’s capital or Brussels. Perhaps more than anything, a lobbyist’s market value, especially if they work for a private, for-hire lobbying firm, is their portfolio of relationships. They are retained by individuals, corporations and interest groups, often for significant amounts of money, because they have built relationships with powerful, influential individuals in the nation’s capital or in Brussels. By doing lots of little favours for lawmakers, such as connecting them with important constituencies, supplying valuable information, helping plot strategy and being generally useful, a lobbyist builds a reciprocal relationship based on trust and mutual need and even a sense of obligation . The danger is that these relationships can end up being more important to lobbyists than the people they are supposed to represent . So what can be taught about relationship building? Arguably, five elements of relationship building are teachable.

1. First, what can be taught is that relationships with lawmakers are not like real, personal relationships or even many relationships in business. They are built on mutual need, the ability of each person to provide the other with something they have to possess to achieve their goals.
2. Second, relationships are targeted, and lobbyists must know with which lawmakers they need to build relationships to get their work done. A particular lawmaker should be targeted because the lobbyist has something to offer the lawmaker, who, in turn, will offer the lobbyist a crucial point of access to the lawmaking superstructure. Students can be taught, to some extent, to identify which lawmakers might be responsive to the information they can offer, and who have an electoral-based interest in aiding the constituency the lobbyist represents. Or perhaps the lobbyist and lawmaker have a mutual interest in the same areas of public policy. Students can be taught to identify these links. Just as with communication and messaging, they can be taught best practices in identifying targets and how to approach them. They can even be taught to respect a lawmaker’s precious time, learning the best time to approach a lawmaker, like when an issue important to both the lobbyist and lawmaker is about to come up, and when to stay away, such as when there is no chance the issue of concern to both is going to come up. Lawmakers and their staff rarely have time for small talk, except perhaps at fundraisers.
3. Third, it is vital that any student who hopes to have a career in lobbying better learn to at least look like they are enjoying spending time with other people. Sometimes time spent socializing for the interest group needs to be balanced with time spent with friends or family. Even if going to a fundraiser in the evening is the last thing one wants to do and one is sick of small talk with other people, it still needs to be done. To be seen by the lawmaker shows that the lobbyist values the legislator, and helps build the sense of obligation. The same goes for calling other people to also come to the fundraiser and give. And if one feel conspicuous because the smile on one’s face at the event is fake, the lobbyist should take comfort in knowing that he/she is almost certainly not the only one!
4. Fourth, every student being taught about public policy advocacy should undergo an internship or practicum, often more than one. The first professional relationships can be built during these semester long experiences, but students may need to be reminded of this during advising. Reinforcing the long-term benefits of building a professional network can complement teaching about relationship-building in class.
5. Finally, the ethics of relationship building, such as they are, can be taught. A curriculum on professional lobbying, like law or medicine, must incorporate a code of ethics. What can be taught about ethical behaviour? Not lying, the most basic rule of all in lobbying , can certainly be taught (though it might surprise students to hear it). Similarly, students can be taught the importance of confidentiality. If they understand the importance of reciprocity and mutual need defining the lobbyist–lawmaker relationship, then the crucial importance of honesty ought to be self-evident. They can also be taught that there is a crucial exception to the confidentiality rule of the lawmaker–lobbyist relationship – the lobbyist is, first and foremost, an agent of an organized interest or client employing them and that they, not the lawmakers, are a lobbyist’s first responsibility. This may mean the ethical lobbyist cannot promise the lawmaker confidentiality if something comes up crucial to the people the lobbyist represents, even if the relationships furthering their professional ambitions are better served by prioritizing the lawmaker’s needs.  Of course good lobbyists make sure there is never a conflict between what their members and clients know and what lawmakers knows so there is no confidentiality problem. Mastering this balancing act, though, is something one has to learn on the job; it cannot be easily taught. Moreover, ethical training ought to address the need to balance the public interest with their clients’ specialized interests. After exploring conceptually whether there is such a thing as an objective common good or public interest, future lobbyists can learn how it may be no more their responsibility for achieving it than it is for a lawyer to see his or her client convicted when they, in fact, are guilty. Put another way, just as an ethical lawyer must see that a client’s due process is followed if she or he knows they are guilty, so too must an ethical lobbyist vigorously advocate the interests of the group of citizens, nonprofits or businesses that are paying the lobbyist to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The ethical lobbyist is a faithful advocate for the political interests of others, not the interests of the entire polity. The responsibility of determining the public interest lays on public interest on elected officials, not contractually obligated lobbyists.

Value of Simulations

The classroom is not only a place for learning knowledge and information, but also a place for developing skills, and one way of doing that is through simulated experience. If the job is to teach one to be a lobbyist, then it makes sense to practice being a lobbyist, even if everyone is still in the classroom. Courses should require students to design whole lobbying campaigns from start to finish (at least to the extent that any lobbying enterprise has a start and finish) within a political context. Though specific simulation assignment prompts ought to be tailored to the course and faculty members’ preferences, some possible modules may include (and are certainly not limited to):

Process learning:

• Recruiting clients for a lobbying firm;
• Seeking policy priority inputs from senior managers and boards of directors;
• Learning advanced budgeting, legislative and bureaucratic procedures;

Policy learning:

• Determining lobbying strategies and identifying stakeholders, such as coalition partners, primary competitors and policy champions inside government;
• Conducting detailed policy histories and detailing policy alternatives and arguments;
• Expanding lobbying strategies to include: policy implementation beyond the legislative setting; policy development at the state and local or international institutional settings;

Analytical learning:

• Collecting, organizing and analyzing relevant data to support lobbying strategy;
• Drafting ‘white papers’, and preparing testimony for public hearings;
• Reporting results and recommending future actions back to the client or to senior organizational managers.

Hypothetical assignments introduce students to the complexities of a lobbying campaign and can also serve as a professional portfolio when they enter the lobbying and advocacy job market. Although simulations often cannot capture the unexpected and unpredictable swings of political warfare, they nonetheless give the student a chance to put all of the pieces together to see how different strategies under different circumstances might bring a favorable conclusion.

Curriculum Thoughts

A curriculum that teaches the skills needed for lobbying and similar forms of political management and consulting needs to go much further than materials giving broad overviews on how interest group politics work. First, actually teaching the profession of lobbying is best focused at the graduate level, supplemented later by continuing education programmes. Undergraduate education is often still covering the fundamentals of government and research methods, mainly what was called earlier process learning and analytical learning, and it is doubtful that even upper level classes on interest groups, lobbying, and the executive branch could cover everything in enough detail for students to really be qualified to be even an apprentice lobbyist. Lobbying can be incorporated into those courses, but likely not taught as a stand-alone course as at the graduate level. A student who excels in these broader classes at the undergraduate level, however, should be in a good place to study the advanced material in a graduate program, probably one that really specializes in teaching lobbying, advocacy and interest group management. This is especially the case if the undergraduate student supplemented their experience with a political internship.

Second, in graduate courses, a curriculum following the three basic topics should work. Traditional graduate lecture courses or in-depth seminars have a role to play simply because there is a lot of information and knowledge which still needs to be provided. Of course that also means having faculty on staff who are themselves specialists in the branches of government as well as lobbying, organizational management, and communications and public relations. Public relations courses on the crafting and delivery of messages are also a must, and this includes a course on effective use of social media. University curricula are probably not full of courses on relationship building, but an innovative faculty member in a programme on political management might be in a good position to take this on. All of this should be supplemented with simulations, and a good capstone course would require students to design and execute through simulation an entire lobbying campaign. Such capstones need not be static assignments, rather the simulation can be enlivened with dynamic elements such as where the professor throws surprise barriers at the student to be overcome across the course of the semester. Finally, graduate-level internships for full-time students or practicum experiences for working professionals would be a must, especially because they could lead to actual placement at the end of the graduate programme.

Finally, it is, of course, worth pointing out that experience and a university education can go together, as exemplified by the internship. Working for a semester, or even just a summer, gives a student significant exposure to the intricacies of the rules of the game, and even some insight into the different personalities of key lawmakers. Whether it is interning in a Parliamentarian office , with one of the parties, or in an actual lobbying or consulting firm or interest group, such opportunities provide students with enormous insight into how the political system works, and may even provide them with a few crucial contacts so necessary for achieving much of anything including the landing of one’s first job.

Still, it is always fun to speculate about just what a lobbying-focused curriculum would look like. Courses would focus on the structure and function of institutional politics at the national, state and local and supra-national levels of governance.

Emphasis would be placed on the idea that the institutional context may determine the degree that lobbying is relationship-dependent and professionalized.

A curriculum leading to a master’s degree or a more condensed graduate-level certificate programme would most likely be training people already in the lobbying profession, and could focus on:

• Interest group politics
• Legislative politics
• Executive branch politics
• Judicial politics

Course specializing in an area of policy (one or two of these, the second replacing the second internship or practicum course)

Courses emphasizing communication and messaging might be:

• Writing in public relations
• Political communication and advocacy
• Communicating through digital technology and social media

Courses helping students understand, and actually build, political relationships are a blend of experience-based internships or practicums along with actual classes:

• Political management
• Internship or Practicum (one or two of these, the second in place of a course specializing in a policy area)

Capstone (using simulations to pull all of these elements together in a professional portfolio)

Regardless of the targeted audience or the specific delivery method, there is clearly much that political science can do to train the would-be lobbyist.