story,interview

The shadow lobbyists

When Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D) lost his reelection in 2004, he went to go work for the law firm of Alston & Bird, and later to the even bigger firm DLA Piper. But though these firms do extensive lobbying and government advocacy work, Daschle has never registered as a lobbyist.

That's because the Lobbying Disclosure Act requires registration only under particular circumstances. "You have to spend 20 percent of your time on behalf of one client in the quarter in which you're reporting," LaPira says. But such a narrow definition could leave out many people who do lobbying or advocacy work. "How often do you spend an entire day working on a single project every week, for an entire quarter?" LaPira asks. "That's just not the modern professional world."

LaPira believed there were many more examples than just Daschle. During his research, he would often look up a particular registered lobbyist, and notice that he or she would be working with others doing similar things — except those others weren't registered. It made him wonder, just how many unregistered lobbyists are out there?

Google-stalking

So LaPira consulted Lobbyists.info, which he calls "the lobbyist phone book." The site compiles an extensive directory of people in federal lobbying-related jobs, including many who don't fit the law's technical definition. LaPira bought their full catalog of over 30,000 names, and pulled out a much smaller random sample from that. He then had student research assistants "essentially Google-stalk" the people in that sample "to try to reconstruct their resumes." The question he sought to answer was, he says: "Is the job that we can determine from their biography or from their job title or from the firm they're working for — are they engaged in federal public policy? If so we call them a policy advocate."

"The revolving door lobbyist is trading on... connections and access"

What LaPira found was that, of the people in the sample who did do that work, "about half of them were registered to lobby and half of them weren't," he says. He co-authored a paper with Herschel Thomas of the University of Texas at Austin on these findings, and then wrote a post for the Sunlight Foundation extrapolating further. Since disclosed spending on federal lobbying has been around $3 billion each year recently, he argued, the actual spending was likely twice that.

The revolving door

LaPira points out that not all lobbyists do the same sort of work. One group, which he calls "conventional" lobbyists, have worked in a particular industry for years and have become experts in that industry. They fiercely advocate for their clients' interests, but they tend not to represent clients from, say, both the health and energy sectors.

For "revolving door" lobbyists — former government staffers who've headed to the influence industry — it's a different story. In another paper, LaPira and Thomas found that these lobbyists tend to have clients from completely unrelated industries. "We interpret this to mean that the revolving door lobbyist is trading on her process knowledge and connections and access," rather than any particular industry expertise, LaPira says.

The consequence is that when these lobbyists' political patrons leave office, the lobbyists themselves become less valuable. This was demonstrated particularly vividly in a recent paper by Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca, and Christian Fons-Rosen. "Lobbyists with experience in the office of a US Senator suffer a 24 percent drop in generated revenue when that Senator leaves office," they write. They say the effect is immediate and long-lasting, and "consistent with the notion that lobbyists sell access to powerful politicians." So when Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, announced last year that we wouldn't run for another term, it was very bad news for his many ex-aides who had become lobbyists.

Does money always win?

So, the research shows that billions of dollars are being spent, it's often undisclosed, and former political staffers are trading on their connections. But there may be at least some semi-good news — lobbyists frequently fail to get what they want out of the government.

In graduate school, LaPira helped research the book Lobbying and Policy Change, written by Frank Baumgartner of the University of North Carolina and four other co-authors. It was a large-scale project that tracked lobbying spending on various issues, and it found, in LaPira's words, that "the side that spends more does not necessarily win."

"Inside the government, politicians have their own motivations," LaPira says. "They have their own public policy goals, and chiefly, they have reelection in mind." For a lobbyist, "it's really hard to get out of the government what you want, especially when you multiply it by the tens of thousands of other interests out there that are all trying to do the same thing."

Recommendations for further reading