The Monkey Cage

More bonehead political science.

There are a lot of bad assumptions here; like there’s something wrong if labor is not the competition.

The author’s own work shows that businesses do not have the same interest. The sheer number of them speaks to their diversity of focus.

Moreover, why should business’s competition be labor, on any but a handful of issues?

The other bad assumption is that business interests are not aligned with the public interest, but labor’s and “public interest” groups always will be. That’s really naive.

I think the public is very interested in keeping businesses healthy, small businesses starting, and employment robust, something we need more of right now. If the proliferation of business groups serves that goal, bring them on.

The only assumption I am making here is that democracy benefits most when there is vigorous representation on both sides of an issue.

I would say that simply counting the number of groups is really very misleading. Moreover, the counts are likely way off.

First of all, lots of interests (business and non-business) in Washington are not represented by a “group” at all, but by paid lobbyists in firms — often lawyers — who specialize in representation of interests. I don’t see any of these in the count.

Second, a valid count then needs to be accompanied by information on budgets, expenditures and/or time (billed hourly in some cases, not in others) spent on an issue. Obviously some firms can be quite sizable, with many staff, while others are tiny, often just a single person. Using the counts is just laughable. I can’t believe any journal or set of reviewers would accept such a measure.

So the story may be perfectly consistent with political science lore, and what political scientists badly want to believe, but it it may well be dead wrong, completely distorted.

These counts include groups that have their own lobbyists as well as those represented by firms. Maybe I should have been clearer about that. Expenditure data are not historically available prior to 1996, but if you do counts by numbers of lobbyists the ratios are similar. Also if you do counts by expenditures on the more current data, the ratios are similar, as well.

You haven’t identified the issue so as to show the absence of vigorous representation. The counts miss the point if these organizations are actually functioning in (or across) different domains.

If business interests are not monolithic, but instead highly diverse, you haven’t shown anything like the absence of competition.

Bring on the data! And I agree that we need some demonstration that business should always properly be competing against labor or public interest groups for vigorous competiton to be occurring; that when these ratios are imbalanced, it shows that something is wrong.

There are issues, after all, where labor and at least some business groups find themselves on the same side. Does this show a dangerous imbalance?

Or is there a dangerous imbalance only on those issues that you believe labor should win, but doesn’t?

But here’s a more academic question: Why do groups get involved at all when there is no competitor on the other side? Is it because they are trying to frighten-off would-be competitors? Is this just a form of insurance? That would be an interesting question to answer.

I think groups get involved on issues they care about or have something to gain from, and if there is no competitor, so much the better for them.

It’s true, business and labor do get together on some issues. These numbers are meant to be rough proxies for the general imbalance in resources/presence of different interests in Washington.

As for more data and detailed elaboration on my arguments, please check out my dissertation (I think you will find the final chapter to be most relevant regarding imbalances): http://www.leedrutman.com/dissertation.html

Also, you will find some elaboration in this paper, which is a condensed version of my dissertation: http://www.leedrutman.com/uploads/2/3/0/1/2301208/the_business_of_america_is_lobbying.pdf

I would welcome your feedback.

I also want to call your attention to an excellent article by Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech — “Interest Niches and Policy Bandwagons: Patterns of Interest Group Involvement in National Politics” — which has has great data on the business bias in Washington and on the one-sided nature of lobbying on many issues:

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1885036

Thanks for sharing your research, Lee.

I share the feeling of some of the commenters above that you may not be leading with your strongest data, or at least not supporting it as well as you could. The number of organizations as a proxy is suggestive about the intensity of lobbying effort, but also subject to some of the questions raised above. I’m very interested in your comment about the amount spent on lobbying by corporations and other groups since 1996, which provides very important corroborating evidence - at a minimum, you should put that in the body of the post.

Have you gathered any other statistics that help illuminate the imbalance? Any anecdotes to help flesh out how it manifests?

Despite some of the cavils above, I think this research is very illuminating, and it tends to confirm what some have guessed or sensed intuitively: i.e. a big and growing imbalance. (Just out of curiosity, do you cite Charles Lindblom on ‘the privileged position of business’? — it seems to have only solidified in the years since he wrote that book (Politics and Markets).

business interests are highly diverse? sure. but what happens when their collective interests are threatened? well, look at OPEC. the OPEC countries do compete with eachother, but they band together when they need to. consequently, all the political science studies on “pluralism” in american politics have shown that public interest and labor groups ARE subordinated to business interests. so the “pluralism” that exists is that of business and business ONLY. the political science work on pluralism has found that when public interest or labor groups try to break into the same level of influence that business groups have, the business groups unite to knock them back down to their place.

also, the view that what’s good for business can also be good for the public is a half-truth. sometimes it can be, sometimes it isn’t. you also have to look within business. sure, it’s important for businesses to thrive to keep people employed, but that doesn’t mean that we should then give CEO’s large bonuses. and what’s good for monsanto, halliburton, blackwater, chevron, and exxon are DEFINITELY not good for the public.

there’s a favorite quote of mine: “what’s good for GM is good for the country.” right.

stop reading ayn rand, people

I have a specific quibble with the suggestion that the 37% of issues in which lobbyists could identify no opposition are issues in which some latent opposition is going unrepresented. A lot of lobbying is about appropriations (pork barrel and otherwise), and you’re not likely to find head-to-head confrontation in distributive politics by definition. There is intense competition for dollars within (maybe even across) appropriations bills, but I don’t think the competing groups would think to identify one another as opponents.

Furthermore, a lot of lobbying is done on program authorizations or reauthorizations. In these cases, there may be no opposing INTEREST to lobby against; the opponent might be a congressional committee or agency legislative affairs office that is pushing legislation contrary to constituent groups’ interests.

On the whole, I don’t think the idea of imbalance in lobbying is one that should be dismissed out of hand because business interests are diverse or business and labor aren’t naturally opposed all the time. But we shouldn’t expect to see confrontational politics on every issue even in a perfect world.

Jake speaks truth.

But we shouldn’t expect to see confrontational politics on every issue even in a perfect world.

Yeah, but the survey showed no public/labor interest counter balance and the groups ratio was similarly extreme.

The number of organizations as a proxy is suggestive about the intensity of lobbying effort, but also subject to some of the questions raised above.

I agree that it’s not the best data to use as a proxy for lobbyist effort, but we already know business interests have much more money from disclosures reports, etc.

Sure some organizations are huge and some are one person shops, but the odds are overwhelming that the public and labor interests groups are more likely to have fewer people and less money.