Money, Priorities, and Stalemate: How Lobbying Affects Public Policy

Based on a large-scale interview-based study of 98 randomly selected cases of lobbying in Washington from 1999 to 2003 (reported in Baumgartner et al. 2009), we found virtually no impact of money on outcomes. We believe that this counterintuitive finding derives from the huge business and corporate bias that permeates Washington and is already built into the policies of the status quo. Lobbying, it is important to remember, is generally about changing the status quo. The accumulated power of wealth, corporate organizational strength, and other factors keeping some actors out of Washington and giving others multiple and louder voices in the process is already reflected in the fabric of the status quo: they are ‘‘baked into the cake.’’ For reforms to have a significant impact, they should focus on who is at the table, not only on what they do once they are there. We found the biggest impact of money when we looked at the huge disjuncture between the concerns of the public and the activities of Washington lobbyists. Our findings represent a cautionary tale for those hoping that regulations on gifts or spending may generate a reversal in the distribution of power in Washington. Such regulations are genuinely needed and may have important effects, but we need to understand their expected limits as well. MONEY, POWER, AND OUTCOMES Many will regard the findings in our book Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (Baumgartner et al. 2009) surprising. Across the random sample of policy disputes which we studied, money did not buy outcomes. The poorer side of the lobbying equation was equally likely to win as the richer side. Often, those protecting the status quo simply did nothing, and those seeking change were unable to gain any attention because of the crush of demands on legislators’ time and attention: there simply was no space on the agenda for many sensible policy changes to be considered. We found a number of counterintuitive results in our study, and many of these have implications for what can reasonably be expected to follow from any effort to tighten campaign or lobbying finance regulations. To some extent, they represent a sobering assessment of the difficulty of designing regulatory changes that might alter the basic structures of power in Washington. THE WASHINGTON RESEARCH Our project was based on a random sample of policy objectives of lobbying during the period from 1999 through 2002. The results are fully documented in Lobbying and Policy Change (Baumgartner et al. 2009), and at an associated website, where we Frank R. Baumgartner is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, NC. Jeffrey M. Berry is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University in Medford, MA. Marie Hojnacki is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Penn State University in University Park, PA. David C. Kimball is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in St. Louis, MO. Beth L. Leech is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. ELECTION LAW JOURNAL Volume 13, Number 1, 2014 # Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/elj.2014.0242