When Does Lobbying Become Undemocratic? Part 1: Discussing the Issue of Funds

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing stigma associated with lobbying; the art of influencing the decisions of government. The word lobbying now evokes scenes of a murky, opaque process carried out behind closed doors between politicians and sharply-dressed corporate lobbyists; scenes tainted by all the marks of unhealthy backstairs intrigue. Many government decisions, including George Osborne’s omission of the 50p tax rate in HM Treasury’s 2012 Budget, have been attributed to lobbying in some form or the other. Over the next few articles I pen, I will try my level best to explain the stigma around lobbying, when it becomes undemocratic and for what reasons.

First, of all the type of lobbying that is being discussed must be established. Lobbying is defined as the art or act of seeking to influence the actions of government through influencing the legislators that carry out these actions. Lobbying is central to the functioning of any democratic state; it allows the people that make up that state to try and make their views heard to government; to ensure that the decisions made take these views into account. After all, the definition of democracy is ‘rule by the people’; lobbying gives the people a way to ensure that their elected representatives are carrying out the decisions that they want, and implementing legislation that they were elected to push through. This type of lobbying is wholly healthy and democratic and does not warrant great examination; examples include petitioning government through platforms like Avaaz and Change.org. These forms of lobbying allow the populace to make their views heard through a hugely accessible online forum; one example is a staggering 1,604,040 people signing Avaaz’s recent petition to halt the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The lobbying that is much more worrying; the lobbying that begins to become uncomfortably undemocratic and evokes sentiments of a growing plutocracy in many countries; including the UK and US, is corporate, commercial lobbying. This lobbying industry is commonly known as the ‘commercial influence industry’, and is made up of entrenched business interests and large corporations trying to find a way into government in a very different way to the former group of lobbyists.

While the former group of lobbyists; the citizens trying to ensure their collective concerns and worries get through to the top tier of the country’s leadership, are behaving in a wholly democratic way, using rational and reasonable logic to back up their concerns and hence to back up their motives for lobbying, their commercial counterparts have very different reasons for lobbying. Tactics employed by corporate lobbyists include perversion of wholly reasonable causes that threaten their employers’ profits, misinformation campaigns and popular fearmongering. These lobbyists are only in the industry for one of two reasons: The profits of the corporation that employs them could take a hit from possible government legislation, or could increase if a certain government decision is made (for example, handing out private NHS contracts to a particular healthcare company). There are many ways that corporations can ensure their lobbyists succeed in pushing the government to make the decisions that they want; these should now be touched upon.

The elephant in the room that immediately appears whenever the word lobbying is mentioned; that of money, must first be addressed. This issue is not very pertinent to the UK; reasonably transparent campaign finance regulations, the ban on TV advertisements and a cap on party spending for campaigning all mean that there is a limited amount of assistance lobbyists can offer candidates by way of winning election or reelection. Due to these restrictions in the UK, lobbyists have come into their own in providing politicians with all-important information on how to develop workable policy. Keeping an ear to the ground to monitor what policies may be well received, as well as finding out how to best draft policies only thought up in principle in reality, all while pleasing the most people possible in the process, are only two of the things lobbyists can do to help politicians develop better policies. The problem is that research and focus groups cost money; so many politicians aren’t provided with the best possible information on the ground to develop their desired policies. The corporate lobbyists, eager at any opportunity to curry favour in a campaign system that largely blocks them out, are happy to provide data to politicians to help them with this problem. In addition to think tanks, which can be touched upon later, this is one of the main ways lobbyists in the UK spend their money.

In the US, the issue is much more acute. Super PACs allow corporations to dump unholy sums of money into the pockets of candidates standing for election, and SCOTUS’ Citizens United decision means that hundreds of millions of dollars can be poured into political campaigns by corporations. The nature of elections in the United States also poses a huge problem; heavy advertising and the use of television and media is key to any candidate standing for the United States Congress, whether as a member of the House of Representatives or the Senate. Hence the money that lobbyists can proffer is not just a nice bonus to a candidate’s campaign; it’s imperative for them to secure a seat. The nature of campaigning in the United States, combined with lax and largely ethical rather than legal spending restrictions, means that there is seriously big money to be spent, and lobbyists can truly decide whether or not members of Congress gain or keep their seats. Lobbying is an entrenched problem in the United States; the culture there is such that almost all candidates have to get their hands dirty to grab themselves a seat; and when they have their seat they owe favours to the people that both got them there and could remove them if they wished to.

Both in the case of the UK and the US, the favours that politicians end up owing lobbyists for valuable policy research and campaign funding mean their views are given a disproportionate weight. This means that narrow, corporate interests end up influencing government decisions more than those of the bulk of the populace; it is the corporations that can provide the funds for politicians to do their job, so once they end up in their positions, they owe less to the people that elected them than those who have provided them with valuable insights and funds to get them in a position to be elected in the first place. In both cases, the concept of ‘lobbying’ as we know it becomes overshadowed by corporate lobbying and corporate lobbying alone; creating a hugely undemocratic situation. In some cases, one may argue this influence is reminiscent of a plutocracy; rule by the rich. The fact that these interests are entrenched and deep-rooted in the political cultures of both nations mean that their resolution will take a significant increase in public knowledge of the issues, and hence demands for a more regulated and transparent lobbying system both for corporate lobbyists. Ordinary people and their collective interests are already clear why they lobby; it’s time for their counterparts to become transparent on why they do so too.

Several notable examples of lobbies holding back significant policy issues and reform are, in no particular order: The NRA gun lobby, the so-called ‘Big Pharma’ lobby of the largest pharmaceutical corporations and the corporate agriculture lobby. The NRA will continue to hold back significant gun control reform in the US, even in the wake of the recent tragic shooting in Charleston; Big Pharma continues to fight the deployment of cheaper, more generic versions of drugs, holding onto patents for dear life and corporate agriculture prevents more sustainable and environmentally-friendly methods of growing food. In countries of over 60 million and 300 million respectively, should the profit-minded interests of only a few incredibly rich people and companies dominate the agendas of policymakers? Despite the laughably-large amounts corporations can dump into political activities, should they be allowed to continue to curry as much political favour as they are doing? In the UK, money is less of a problem than think tanks and media manipulation, both of which will be discussed in a later article, but it remains a problem nonetheless, and politicians need to consciously remove the ingrained obligation they feel towards corporations, and turn back to act in the interests of the populace. In the US, big money is out of control, and one simple resolution to the problem would be much stricter campaign finance regulation, if it would be able to pass a largely corporate-funded Congress.

Further topics that I will tackle in future articles include the use of think tanks as fronts for third party validation of lobbyists’ interests and the use of misinformation and perversion of facts to influence policymakers and, in some cases, the populace themselves. Thank you for reading.

By Dhruv Kaushik