Why are lobbyists so powerful?
The conventional wisdom suggests that lobbyists are powerful because of the money they can spend on campaign contributions and advertising. Wealthy lobbies get their legislative way by coaxing congresspeople with contributions and threatening them with the mass distribution of attack ads. The underlying rationale is that lobbyists have power because they use their money to sway or manipulate voters.
I propose an alternative, complementary thesis. In addition to the promise/threat of influencing voters, lobbyists use their resources to acquire and disseminate knowledge amongst elites. In particular, I suggest that effective lobbyists deploy their resources to do (at least) the following:
1. Deeply research the potential impacts of policy to construct maximally plausible and persuasive arguments for policies that favor the interests of their clients
2.Embed themselves in networks of conversation that contain sources of knowledge that policy makers, including but not limited to elected officials, trust.
3. Coordinate a strategic dissemination of these arguments, including the rapid, iterative researching of contingent arguments in the face of challenge.
In other words, lobbyists are successful because their money gives them knowledge making power. That is, they have the power to form the beliefs of policy makers. Equipped with such knowledge making power, they may not even need to coax or threaten elected officials in regard to their specific elections. In fact, the contributions and advertising strategy is a rather low efficiency use of their resources. It tends to be expensive and to work only on an issue by issue basis. Lobbyists would much prefer for things not to get to that stage. If everyone in Congress believes that, say, cutting taxes stimulates the economy, no expensive ads need to be run or relationships threatened. The “right” policy will just follow as a matter of course.
From the point of view of the lobbyist, these two strategies are complementary. But from the point of view of the counter-lobbyist, a champion for the common good rather than the special interest, the implications are distinct and in many cases opposite.
The best way to fight the coaxing and threatening strategy is to counter-coax and counter-threaten — to raise just as much money and spend it in opposition to the lobbyists threats and ads etc. But if the knowledge strategy is in operation, this counter-strategy will be quite wasteful. Ordinary people are unlikely to be able to match corporate lobbyists for wealth. More importantly, this counter-strategy spends the money in the lowest yield manner — issue-by-issue.
If the knowledge strategy is in operation, the best counter-strategy is to develop an alternative knowledge strategy. Of course, those in support of the common good are unlikely to have achieve the organizational focus necessary to target inside access to a particular network of policy makers. But this is not the only tactic by which the knowledge strategy can be executed. The knowledge strategy can also be executed by promoting a rigorous, well supported, and consistent ideology that has broad scope of application. Working within such an ideology, the natural conclusions drawn by individuals will be the desired conclusions. The greater the rigor and consistency, the greater the likelihood that the conclusions promote the intended goals. The greater the support, the more likely they are to adopt the ideology. The greater its scope, the greater number of policies for which it can do this work — the greater its yield.
If this analysis is correct, it suggests that progressives ought to be spending more money on research and less money on campaign contributions.
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