Direct Lobbying, Grassroots Campaigns, Coalition Building, Financial Influence, and the Art of Getting What You Want From People Who Are Supposed to Represent Everyone
Direct Lobbying, Grassroots Campaigns, Coalition Building, Financial Influence, and the Art of Getting What You Want From People Who Are Supposed to Represent Everyone
The Art of Getting Your Call Returned
Lobbying is, at its core, the practice of communicating with government officials to influence their decisions. This definition is so broad that it encompasses activities ranging from a citizen writing a letter to their congressman to a former Senate Majority Leader representing a foreign government for $15 million a year. The breadth of the definition is not accidental; it reflects the fact that the right to petition the government is constitutionally protected, and distinguishing legitimate advocacy from improper influence is genuinely difficult, particularly when the people making the distinction are the same people whose decisions are being influenced. The system has developed elaborate rules to manage this difficulty. The rules have been extensively gamed. The gaming has produced new rules. The new rules are being gamed. This is the regulatory cycle, applied to the regulation of the regulatory process, which achieves a level of self-referential complexity that would impress a philosophy graduate student.
Professional lobbyists – there are approximately 11,000 registered federal lobbyists, plus an unknown number of “”strategic advisors”” and “”government affairs consultants”” who perform lobbying functions without technically meeting the Lobbying Disclosure Act’s registration threshold – deploy several distinct strategies in pursuit of their clients’ objectives. Understanding these strategies is useful both for appreciating how the system actually works and for explaining why policy outcomes so frequently diverge from what public opinion surveys suggest the public actually wants.
Direct Lobbying: The Meeting, the Memo, and the Amendment
Direct lobbying involves face-to-face contact between lobbyists and government officials – members of Congress, their staffs, executive branch officials, regulatory agency personnel. The meeting is the fundamental unit of direct lobbying. A lobbyist secures a meeting with a member of Congress or, more commonly, with the member’s legislative staff, presents the client’s position on pending legislation or regulation, provides supporting information, answers questions, and requests specific action – a vote, an amendment, a letter, a phone call to an agency, a favorable interpretation of a regulatory provision. The meeting is followed by a memo summarizing the key points, because staffers handle hundreds of issues and the lobbyist’s job is partly to make it easy for the staffer to remember and act on the client’s position.
The quality of a lobbying meeting depends substantially on the relationship between the lobbyist and the official. A former Senate Finance Committee staff director who is now lobbying on tax policy can walk into the offices of current Senate Finance Committee members and be received as a known quantity – someone who understands the legislative process, has credibility on the subject matter, and has existing relationships with the people in the room. A first-time advocate for a constituent concern can also request meetings, and will receive them – democracy is formally accessible – but the quality of access, measured in time, attention, and actual influence on the outcome, is not equal. Access is formally democratic. Influence is not.
Grassroots Lobbying: Manufacturing the Appearance of Public Concern
When direct lobbying is insufficient – when legislators are responsive to constituent pressure and the issue is visible enough to generate public attention – interest groups deploy grassroots lobbying: organizing constituent communications to create the appearance (and sometimes the reality) of broad public support for the client’s position. Genuine grassroots lobbying mobilizes real constituents with real stakes in an issue. Astroturf lobbying – the term coined for manufactured grassroots campaigns – creates the appearance of constituent concern where relatively little exists, using paid organizers, pre-written letters, funded social media campaigns, and front groups with names suggesting broad public support (“”Citizens for Energy Freedom,”” “”Consumers for Quality Healthcare””) that represent primarily the interests of the industry funding them.
The line between genuine and manufactured grassroots advocacy is not always clear to the legislators receiving the communications, and it is not always easy to determine from outside. A campaign that generates 50,000 constituent letters to Congress may represent genuine constituent concern or an industry’s investment in automated letter-generation tools and targeted social media advertising. Both produce the same letters. The letters have the same effect on a member’s staff, who counts them and reports the constituent interest level to the member. The member responds to what appears to be constituent pressure. The pressure was manufactured. The response is real. The policy outcome serves the industry. The constituents whose names appeared on the letters may or may not have known what they were signing. This is democracy working through its available mechanisms, and it is also a fairly precise description of how those mechanisms are routinely exploited.
Financial Influence: The Mechanism Nobody Admits Is Working
Campaign contributions from interest groups – through political action committees and super PACs – do not legally purchase votes. This is both true and somewhat beside the point. The relationship between campaign contributions and legislative behavior is not transactional in the crude sense of payment for specific votes; it is more subtle and therefore more durable. Contributions flow to members who already agree with the donor’s policy positions, reinforcing those positions. Contributions create access – donors get meetings that non-donors do not. Access creates opportunities to make arguments, shape understanding of issues, and build relationships that influence how members think about policy. The relationship is not bribery. It is closer to what political scientists call “”access lobbying”” – the systematic cultivation of relationships between donors and legislators that creates a community of shared understanding and mutual obligation over time.
The practical effect is that members of Congress who receive substantial contributions from an industry tend to vote in ways favorable to that industry at rates higher than would be predicted by their constituents’ preferences or their stated policy principles alone. Whether this correlation reflects the contributions causing the votes or both reflecting underlying shared preferences is the question that campaign finance scholars have spent 40 years arguing about without reaching consensus, which is a remarkably long time to spend on a question whose practical implications are significant and whose answer shapes the entire debate about campaign finance regulation. The uncertainty is genuine. It is also convenient for those who benefit from the current system, which funds the politicians who set the campaign finance rules, which is either a conflict of interest or just how it works, depending on whether you have a lobbying contract.
SOURCE: The London Prat