Revolving Door Lobbying

Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests

Timothy M. LaPira, Herschel F. Thomas III

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700624508, 9780700624508
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624515
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent decades Washington has seen an alarming rise in the number of “revolving door lobbyists”—politicians and officials cashing in on their government experience to become influence peddlers on K Street. These lobbyists, popular wisdom suggests, sell access to the highest bidder. Revolving Door Lobbying tells a different, more nuanced story. As an insider interviewed in the book observes, where the general public has the “impression that lobbyists actually get things done, I would say 90 percent of what lobbyists do is prevent harm to their client from the government.”

Drawing on extensive new data on lobbyists’ biographies and interviews with dozens of experts, authors Timothy M. LaPira and Herschel F. Thomas establish the facts of the revolving door phenomenon—facts that suggest that, contrary to widespread assumptions about insider access, special interests hire these lobbyists as political insurance against an increasingly dysfunctional, unpredictable government. With their insider experience, revolving door lobbyists offer insight into the political process, irrespective of their connections to current policymakers. What they provide to their clients is useful and marketable political risk-reduction. Exploring this claim, LaPira and Thomas present a systematic analysis of who revolving door lobbyists are, how they differ from other lobbyists, what interests they represent, and how they seek to influence public policy.

The first book to marshal comprehensive evidence of revolving door lobbying, LaPira and Thomas revise the notion that lobbyists are inherently and institutionally corrupt. Rather, the authors draw a complex and sobering picture of the revolving door as a consequence of the eroding capacity of government to solve the public's problems.

PART I

The Politics of Washington’s Revolving Door

1

The Problem

The Alarming Rise of the Revolving Door

Special interests are not in the business of buying policy outcomes. They are in the market to cover their political backsides.

Popular wisdom suggests that Washington lobbyists generate influence for the highest bidder. That is, they operate on behalf of well-heeled clients to demand public policies that favor those who can write the biggest checks. If popular wisdom were true, it would follow that lobbyists are able to tweak legislative language outside of public view, secure lucrative earmarks for particular businesses, and loosen costly regulations at will. Those who outspend their political opponents are, it would seem, guaranteed favorable policy changes from a government beholden to powerful lobbyists.

The evidence, however, suggests that this view—one of influence production, corruption, and quid pro quo deal making—is far from political reality. Despite media coverage of the occasional bad apples, such as the notorious Jack Abramoff, the typical lobbyist is a political professional with useful policy expertise and institutional knowledge. One lobbyist might know the ins and outs of a highly technical policy issue, while another is keenly versed in how Washington works (or doesn’t work) under various circumstances. More often than not, lobbyists provide information to their already supportive allies in Congress and seek to keep the status quo.

If the presence of lobbyists in the policy process is so benign, then why do organizations spend over $3 billion annually to employ them in the nation’s capital? (Center for Responsive Politics [CRP] Lobbying Database at OpenSecrets.org). In this book, we argue that interest groups do not buy policy influence or outcomes through lobbying. Rather, organized interests pay lobby-ists—often handsomely—to reduce the risk that government will take some action without taking into account how it will affect them. We argue that special interests purchase lobbyists’ various services as political insurance against what they perceive to be opaque, dysfunctional, and unpredictable government action.

Counter to popular wisdom, we argue that lobbyists do not dictate what the government will do. They simply provide information to help the government to do what it already wants to do, or they closely observe what the government is doing and report it back to their employers and clients. The point is to minimize harm or maximize the benefits to the interests they represent, but no one lobbyist has the institutional authority or persuasive clout to get the complex policy process to change on a dime to meet their needs—though they certainly have an incentive to make their employers and clients think they do. Lobbyists on staff and retainer are continuously available to preemptively respond to threats and opportunities as they arise, just as people and corporations buy insurance in case something bad happens in the future. Just like insurance, lobbyists do not generate value or wealth between the initiation of the policy and some indemnifiable event. They are only as good as their capacity to collect or provide policy or process expertise when it matters. As one political law compliance lawyer we interviewed put it,

More and more, all people know is that Congress on any given day—or the administration on any given day—can decide to have a sort of policy drive-by shooting of your company or industry. You want to prevent that. I think a lot of people in the general public have an impression that lobbyists actually get things done. I would say 90 percent of what lobbyists do here is prevent harm to their client from the government. These clients often times are in a fetal position. They just want the government to not hurt them.

In this book, we argue that the interest group system operates as a market for lobbyists’ services, even when lobbyists do not actually get things done. Not unlike an insurance adjuster who arrives after a hurricane, an otherwise dormant lobbyist is most useful if the government does a policy drive-by on any given day. The benefits are only available if you pay for it ahead of time.

The hiring of lobbyists as political insurance to stave off threats or to exploit windows of policy opportunities takes multiple forms. For example, lobbyists may help interest groups continuously monitor the government so they know if such events may happen long before they reach headlines. The right lobbyists can provide policy makers with information to minimize the impact when they do. Interest groups buy long-term political coverage from their lobbyists even though they supply little tangible benefits in the short run.

Of course, not all organized interests are equal. A select few have the resources to buy the most and the best coverage, even though they gain little immediate benefit. Over the long run, policies are more likely to reflect the preferences of these resource-rich groups because they can afford the best political insurance. The result may appear as if the wealthy and well organized are buying policies that suit them (Gilens and Page 2014) even though there is no connection between lobbying expenditures and policy outcomes (Baumgartner et al. 2009). If our idea that lobbying is the consumption of political insurance rather than the investment of political capital, then we need to know more about what exactly is being consumed. We think the key lies in individual lobbyists’ characteristics.

Lobbyists as Individuals

While academic scholarship on lobbying tends to treat individual lobbyists as interchangeable agents—mere widgets within the interest group machine—we maintain that different kinds of lobbyists provide different kinds of political insurance coverage. We suppose some lobbyists are better at supplying the right policy expertise at the right time, whereas others are superior for providing insider political knowledge despite the policy substance. Different political problems demand different forms of political insurance coverage. In this project, we adopt the position that lobbyists are not merely replaceable parts in the vast, complex system of organized interests. They are agents with varying qualities who are strategically deployed on behalf of organized interests to resolve different problems. Curiously, what lobbyists’ qualities are, how much they vary, and how they are strategically deployed remain a mystery.

Earlier generations of interest group scholars tended to focus more on individual qualities than in recent years (Herring 1929; Eulau 1964; Deakin 1966; Salisbury et al. 1989). Attention to individuals is largely absent in the more recent neopluralist literature (McFarland 2004; Lowery 2007). In the review essay “You Don’t Know Jack: Principals, Agents, and Lobbying,” David Lowery and Kathleen Marchetti (2012) take political scientists to task for having had so little to contribute to the fallout from the Abramoff scandal as a result of a lack of attention to lobbyists as individuals:

In large part, we have nothing to say about Jack Abramoff because lobbyists have largely disappeared from the study of interest representation. Instead, the unit of analysis we now use in studies of mobilization and organization demography is typically the lobby organization itself, not its lobbyists (for example Schlozman 1984; Gray and Lowery 1996). Similarly, studies of lobbying tactics and strategies now typically focus on issues as a unit of analysis, ascribing their selection to the context in which an issue is considered (for example Kollman 1998; Baumgartner et al. 2009). More to the point, in both scenarios, the lobbyist is conceptualized as a superconducting transmitter linking the issues of concern to organizations to responsible officials with no loss of energy and with perfect fidelity. (140)

Throughout this book, we empirically explore the claim that lobbyists’ individual characteristics matter. We suggest that one characteristic—whether or not the lobbyist has spun through the so-called revolving door between government and the private sector—is the key to understanding political insurance coverage. Revolving door lobbyists are defined by their government career paths before K Street. Some may have worked on Capitol Hill as staffers for individual members or in support of a congressional committee. Others may have worked for party leaders in Congress, held high public office themselves, or come from the White House and executive branch agencies. This implies that not all experiences are equal, so we aim to account for how lobbyists with different experience in government affect the interests they represent and their advocacy behavior.

These experiences, we argue, grant these lobbyists discernible, and marketable, human assets. Revolving door lobbyists’ insider knowledge about the decision-making procedures and processes of their former employers can minimize the numerous political risks borne by their clients. We diverge in this perspective from the more common perspective that lobbyists sell privileged access to their former employers (Blanes i Vidal, Draca, and Fons-Rosen 2012; Bertrand, Bombardini, and Trebbi 2014). The presumption here is that lobbyists are trading more on their personal connections to a legislator or regulator than on their knowledge of the nuances and peculiarities of policy processes in certain government venues or contexts.

We contend that process knowledge is far more important than the professional connections made while working in government.

The political access assumption implies some immediate and direct conflict of interest; government officials grant revolving door lobbyists access to the hypothetical decision-making table that they would not otherwise have. Yet we do not think such direct connections are critical for the revolving door to have an impact on interest representation. Rather, knowing how the process really works provides far more productive advocacy and political risk-reducing benefits to lobbying clients than having close insider connections does.

While recent empirical work demonstrates links between lobbyists’ activities and the committee assignments of their former employers in Congress (Bertrand, Bombardini, and Trebbi 2014), we claim that such behavior is not due to the granting of special access. Instead, it is related to specific knowledge about the decision-making procedures that the legislator uses. If professional connections were all that mattered, then the interest representation and policy advocacy behavior associated with revolving door lobbyists would be limited only to those with direct links to a member of Congress, congressional committee, or executive agency. In this book, we show the opposite is true; government experiences differentiate revolving door lobbyists’ behavior from others despite direct connections to specific regulators, lawmakers, and other authoritative actors in government. Revolving door lobbyists are not selling the contents of their Rolodex; they are selling their knowledge of the process. Our view is that it matters less who you know than it does what you know about how things really work on the inside. Only legitimate experience working in government can give you that.

The Explosive Rise of Revolving Door Lobbying

The presence of revolving door lobbyists in Washington has risen dramatically in recent decades, which leaves us with the question of why organized interests have increased their demand for political insurance over time. One Washington political law attorney and revolving door lobbyist we interviewed shared this anecdote:

If you were able to look back forty years ago to see how many former senators were lobbying, I guarantee you could count them on one hand. You could probably count them on three fingers. House members? It was always same thing. Thirty at most. So you have to go back to the ’70s, maybe the ’80s. . . . When I worked on the Hill throughout the ’80s, I think I was lobbied once by a former member [of Congress], and . . . it was sort of strange.

This lawyer’s intuition is a testable hypothesis. We identified three key studies that trace the increasing likelihood that key government personnel become lobbyists, all of which motivate and justify our theoretical model and empirical strategy.¹

In the first study, Parker (2008) relies on a survey of 229 former members of Congress, which he also augments with in-person interviews and other data sources. The study’s primary objective is to assess the many varieties of postcongressional employment. In one test that is relevant to our case, Parker categorizes the subset of former members by the decades that they arrived and departed Congress (116). He finds that zero members in his sample who departed Congress before 1970 became lobbyists, whereas 53 percent of those who departed after 2000 did. The percentage of former members turned lobbyists in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: THE POLITICS OF WASHINGTON’S REVOLVING DOOR
• 1 The Problem: The Alarming Rise of the Revolving Door
• 2 The Puzzle: The K Street Kingpin or the Librarian
• 3 The Model: Lobbying as Political Insurance
• PART II. THE EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF WASHINGTON’S REVOLVING DOOR
• 4 How Lucrative Is the Revolving Door? The Political Economy of K Street
• 5 Revolving Door Lobbyists Are the Unheavenly Chorus
• 6 Issue Politics on K Street
• 7 Policy Agendas, Legislative Priorities, and the Revolving Door Lobbying Strategy
• PART III. THE POLICY AND NORMATIVE IMPLICATIONS OF WASHINGTON’S REVOLVING DOOR
• 8 Reassessing Lobbying Regulation in Washington
• 9 Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover