What changes have occurred in the lobbying environment over the past four decades?

Participation in the United States has never been equal; wealth and education, components of socioeconomic status, are strong predictors of political engagement.Sidney Verba, Kay Lehmnn Schlozman, and Henry Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. We already discussed how wealth can help overcome collective action problems, but lack of wealth also serves as a barrier to participation more generally. These types of barriers pose challenges, making it less likely for some groups than others to participate.Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen. 2003. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America. New York: Longman. Some institutions, including large corporations, are more likely to participate in the political process than others, simply because they have tremendous resources. And with these resources, they can write a check to a political campaign or hire a lobbyist to represent their organization. Writing a check and hiring a lobbyist are unlikely options for a disadvantaged group (Figure).

Individually, the poor may not have the same opportunities to join groups.Verba et al., Voice and Equality; Mark J. Rozell, Clyde Wilcox, and Michael M. Franz. 2012. Interest Groups in American Campaigns: The New Face of Electioneering. Oxford University Press: New York. They may work two jobs to make ends meet and lack the free time necessary to participate in politics. Further, there are often financial barriers to participation. For someone who punches a time-clock, spending time with political groups may be costly and paying dues may be a hardship. Certainly, the poor are unable to hire expensive lobbying firms to represent them. Structural barriers like voter identification laws may also disproportionately affect people with low socioeconomic status, although the effects of these laws may not be fully understood for some time.

The poor may also have low levels of efficacy, which refers to the conviction that you can make a difference or that government cares about you and your views. People with low levels of efficacy are less likely to participate in politics, including voting and joining interest groups. Therefore, they are often underrepresented in the political arena.

Minorities may also participate less often than the majority population, although when we control for wealth and education levels, we see fewer differences in participation rates. Still, there is a bias in participation and representation, and this bias extends to interest groups as well. For example, when fast food workers across the United States went on strike to demand an increase in their wages, they could do little more than take to the streets bearing signs, like the protestors shown in Figure. Their opponents, the owners of restaurant chains and others who pay their employees minimum wage, could hire groups such as the Employment Policies Institute, which paid for billboard ads in Times Square in New York City. The billboards implied that raising the minimum wage was an insult to people who worked hard and discouraged people from getting an education to better their lives.Aaron Smith, “Conservative Group’s Times Square Billboard Attacks a $15 Minimum Wage,” 31 August 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/31/news/economy/times-square-minimum-wage/.

Finally, people do not often participate because they lack the political skill to do so or believe that it is impossible to influence government actions.Robert Putnam. 2000. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon and Shuster; Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America. They might also lack interest or could be apathetic. Participation usually requires some knowledge of the political system, the candidates, or the issues. Younger people in particular are often cynical about government’s response to the needs of non-elites.

How do these observations translate into the way different interests are represented in the political system? Some pluralist scholars like David Truman suggest that people naturally join groups and that there will be a great deal of competition for access to decision-makers.David B. Truman 1951. The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Knopf. Scholars who subscribe to this pluralist view assume this competition among diverse interests is good for democracy. Political theorist Robert Dahl argued that “all active and legitimate groups had the potential to make themselves heard.”Dahl, Robert A. 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Dahl, Robert A. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. In many ways, this is an optimistic assessment of representation in the United States.

However, not all scholars accept the premise that mobilization is natural and that all groups have the potential for access to decision-makers. The elite critique suggests that certain interests, typically businesses and the wealthy, are advantaged and that policies more often reflect their wishes than anyone else’s. Political scientist E. E. Schattschneider noted that “the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upperclass accent.”E. E. Schattschneider. 1960. The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 35. A number of scholars have suggested that businesses and other wealthy interests are often overrepresented before government, and that poorer interests are at a comparative disadvantage.W. G. Domhoff. 2009. Who rules America? Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall; K. L. Schlozman, “What Accent the Heavenly choir? Political Equality and the American Pressure System,” Journal of Politics 46, No. 2 (1984) 1006–1032; K. L. Schlozman, S. Verba, and H. E. Brady. 2012. The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. For example, as we’ve seen, wealthy corporate interests have the means to hire in-house lobbyists or high-priced contract lobbyists to represent them. They can also afford to make financial contributions to politicians, which at least may grant them access. The ability to overcome collective action problems is not equally distributed across groups; as Mancur Olson noted, small groups and those with economic advantages were better off in this regard.Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective Action. Disadvantaged interests face many challenges including shortages of resources, time, and skills.

A study of almost eighteen hundred policy decisions made over a twenty-year period revealed that the interests of the wealthy have much greater influence on the government than those of average citizens. The approval or disapproval of proposed policy changes by average voters had relatively little effect on whether the changes took place. When wealthy voters disapproved of a particular policy, it almost never was enacted. When wealthy voters favored a particular policy, the odds of the policy proposal’s passing increased to more than 50 percent.Kevin Drum, “Nobody Cares What You Think Unless You’re Rich,” Mother Jones, 8 April 2014, http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/04/nobody-cares-what-you-think-unless-youre-rich. Indeed, the preferences of those in the top 10 percent of the population in terms of income had an impact fifteen times greater than those of average income. In terms of the effect of interest groups on policy, Gilens and Page found that business interest groups had twice the influence of public interest groups.Larry Bartels, “Rich People Rule!” Washington Post, 8 April 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/08/rich-people-rule.

Figure shows contributions by interests from a variety of different sectors. We can draw a few notable observations from the table. First, large sums of money are spent by different interests. Second, many of these interests are business sectors, including the real estate sector, the insurance industry, businesses, and law firms.

Interest group politics are often characterized by whether the groups have access to decision-makers and can participate in the policy-making process. The iron triangle is a hypothetical arrangement among three elements (the corners of the triangle): an interest group, a congressional committee member or chair, and an agency within the bureaucracy.Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech. 1998. Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Political Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Each element has a symbiotic relationship with the other two, and it is difficult for those outside the triangle to break into it. The congressional committee members, including the chair, rely on the interest group for campaign contributions and policy information, while the interest group needs the committee to consider laws favorable to its view. The interest group and the committee need the agency to implement the law, while the agency needs the interest group for information and the committee for funding and autonomy in implementing the law.Francis E. Rourke. 1984. Bureaucracy, Politics, and Public Policy, 3rd ed. NY: Harper Collins.

An alternate explanation of the arrangement of duties carried out in a given policy area by interest groups, legislators, and agency bureaucrats is that these actors are the experts in that given policy area. Hence, perhaps they are the ones most qualified to process policy in the given area. Some view the iron triangle idea as outdated. Hugh Heclo of George Mason University has sketched a more open pattern he calls an issue network that includes a number of different interests and political actors that work together in support of a single issue or policy.Hugh Heclo. 1984. “Issue Networks and the Executive Establishment.” In The New American Political System, ed. Anthony King. Washington DC: The American Enterprise Institute, 87–124.

Some interest group scholars have studied the relationship among a multitude of interest groups and political actors, including former elected officials, the way some interests form coalitions with other interests, and the way they compete for access to decision-makers.V. Gray and D. Lowery, “To Lobby Alone or in a Flock: Foraging Behavior among Organized Interests,” American Politics Research 26, No. 1 (1998): 5–34; M. Hojnacki, “Interest Groups’ Decisions to Join Alliances or Work Alone,” American Journal of Political Science 41, No. 1 (1997): 61–87; Kevin W. Hula. 1999. Lobbying Together: Interest Group Coalitions in Legislative Politics. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Some coalitions are long-standing, while others are temporary. Joining coalitions does come with a cost, because it can dilute preferences and split potential benefits that the groups attempt to accrue. Some interest groups will even align themselves with opposing interests if the alliance will achieve their goals. For example, left-leaning groups might oppose a state lottery system because it disproportionately hurts the poor (who participate in this form of gambling at higher rates), while right-leaning groups might oppose it because they view gambling as a sinful activity. These opposing groups might actually join forces in an attempt to defeat the lottery.

While most scholars agree that some interests do have advantages, others have questioned the overwhelming dominance of certain interests. Additionally, neopluralist scholars argue that certainly some interests are in a privileged position, but these interests do not always get what they want.Virginia Gray and David Lowery. 1996. The Population Ecology of Interest Representation: Lobbying Communities in the American States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Andrew S. McFarland. 2004. Neopluralism. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Instead, their influence depends on a number of factors in the political environment such as public opinion, political culture, competition for access, and the relevance of the issue. Even wealthy interests do not always win if their position is at odds with the wish of an attentive public. And if the public cares about the issue, politicians may be reluctant to defy their constituents. If a prominent manufacturing firm wants fewer regulations on environmental pollutants, and environmental protection is a salient issue to the public, the manufacturing firm may not win in every exchange, despite its resource advantage. We also know that when interests mobilize, opposing interests often counter-mobilize, which can reduce advantages of some interests. Thus, the conclusion that businesses, the wealthy, and elites win in every situation is overstated.Mark A. Smith. 2000. American Business and Political Power: Public Opinion, Elections, and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; F. R. Baumgartner, J. M. Berry, M. Hojnacki, D. C. Kimball, and B. L. Leech. 2009, Lobbying and Policy Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

A good example is the recent dispute between fast food chains and their employees. During the spring of 2015, workers at McDonald’s restaurants across the country went on strike and marched in protest of the low wages the fast food giant paid its employees. Despite the opposition of restaurant chains and claims by the National Restaurant Association that increasing the minimum wage would result in the loss of jobs, in September 2015, the state of New York raised the minimum wage for fast food employees to $15 per hour, an amount to be phased in over time. Buoyed by this success, fast food workers in other cities continued to campaign for a pay increase, and many low-paid workers have promised to vote for politicians who plan to boost the federal minimum wage.Patrick McGeehan, “New York Plans $15-an-Hour Minimum Wage for Fast Food Workers,” New York Times, 22 July 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/nyregion/new-york-minimum-wage-fast-food-workers.html; Paul Davidson, “Fast-Food Workers Strike, Seeing $15 Wage, Political Muscle,” USA Today, 10 November 2015 http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/11/10/fast-food-strikes-begin/75482782/.

Visit the websites for the California or Michigan secretary of state, state boards of elections, or relevant governmental entity and ethics websites where lobbyists and interest groups must register. Several examples are provided but feel free to examine the comparable web page in your own state. Spend some time looking over the lists of interest groups registered in these states. Do the registered interests appear to reflect the important interests within the states? Are there patterns in the types of interests registered? Are certain interests over- or underrepresented?