As Lessig writes, the typical lobbyist today plays an important, even crucial, part in the political system. In addition to providing campaign contributions and employment prospects to outgoing elected officials and their staffs, he or she provides legislative expertise. Political scientists call this “the legislative subsidy” model of lobbying, and it poses a serious challenge to the view that lobbyists are little more than parasites.
The theory was first proposed by Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff in a 2006 paper entitled “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy.” The paper was an attempt to solve a problem that, at first glance, should not have needed to be solved, because it should not have existed in the first place: Why is the behavior of lobbyists so hard to predict?
For instance: you would think that lobbyists would concentrate their financial power and well-honed connections on the politicians they need to persuade. But they don’t. They concentrate it on the politicians who are already most convinced of their positions. Abramoff was an example of this: he spent most of his time among conservative legislators who were already committed to fighting tax increases and new regulations.
Another puzzle: lobbying, at least in its bluntest form, doesn’t seem to work. For many Americans, lobbying is a form of bribery. A rich lobbyist goes to a corrupt congressman, money changes hands, and the lobbyist gets his vote while the congressman gets money for his campaign. Many researchers have tried to find systematic evidence of vote buying. Very few have succeeded. Lessig quotes research by Dan Clawson, Mark Weller, and Alan Neustadtl, which concluded, “Many critics of big money campaign finance seem to assume that a corporate donor summons a senator and says, ‘Senator, I want you to vote against raising the minimum wage. Here’s $5,000 to do so.’ This view, in its crude form, is simply wrong.” Lessig concurs:
“If the only way that government power could be converted into campaign cash were by crossing the boundaries of criminal law, then there would be no book to write here. If the only possible “corruption” were the corruption regulated by bribery statutes, then I’d be the first to insist that ours is not a corrupt Congress.”
Hall and Deardorf proposed an alternative: lobbying, they argue, is
“a matching grant of costly policy information, political intelligence, and labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators. The proximate objective of this strategy is not to change legislators’ minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives. Their budget constraint thus relaxed by lobbyists’ assistance, already likeminded legislators act as if they were working on behalf of the group when in fact they are working on behalf of themselves.”
In other words, lobbyists act like a volunteer, and highly skilled, army for politicians who already agree with them.
Based on insider experience, I can confirm that this is indeed how it works for senior politicians. The exception would be campaign financing, which happens at the electorate level and probably leads to some bias, but it usually comes from people already close to the politicians. Sure, explicit bribery may occur, but I’ve never seen it happen.
Interesting. It makes sense to me that it’s more assisting natural allies than explicit bribery.
But I still sense something is going on here. It’s an intuitive suspicion and I don’t understand it well enough to make a strong argument for it, but I’ll try to communicate what I’m thinking.
I see that special interests that have lobbying power get a lot more done than the interests that don’t have as much lobbying power. And probably more so is that I hear other people saying this so much. Almost as if it’s common knowledge. So this makes me think that lobbying is in some way having a huge impact.
This excerpt seems to be arguing that they have the impact by assisting natural allies rather than explicit bribery, but it doesn’t seem to claim that lobbyists aren’t having a big impact. Perhaps there’s a lot of implicit influence going on? For example, politicians won’t choose a position unless they know that they’ll get the support of lobbyists. In this way, even though it isn’t explicit bribing, lobbyists could still be having a huge impact.
The lobbyist-politician relationship isn’t so contentious or master-slave as you might be imagining. I like Ezra’s Klein account of lobbying as a legislative subsidy:
Based on insider experience, I can confirm that this is indeed how it works for senior politicians. The exception would be campaign financing, which happens at the electorate level and probably leads to some bias, but it usually comes from people already close to the politicians. Sure, explicit bribery may occur, but I’ve never seen it happen.
Interesting. It makes sense to me that it’s more assisting natural allies than explicit bribery.
But I still sense something is going on here. It’s an intuitive suspicion and I don’t understand it well enough to make a strong argument for it, but I’ll try to communicate what I’m thinking.
I see that special interests that have lobbying power get a lot more done than the interests that don’t have as much lobbying power. And probably more so is that I hear other people saying this so much. Almost as if it’s common knowledge. So this makes me think that lobbying is in some way having a huge impact.
This excerpt seems to be arguing that they have the impact by assisting natural allies rather than explicit bribery, but it doesn’t seem to claim that lobbyists aren’t having a big impact. Perhaps there’s a lot of implicit influence going on? For example, politicians won’t choose a position unless they know that they’ll get the support of lobbyists. In this way, even though it isn’t explicit bribing, lobbyists could still be having a huge impact.