How do corporations influence politics

They have also become more pervasive, driven by the growing competitiveness of the process to become more aggressive. External events may drive initial corporate investments in Washington. But once companies begin lobbying, that lobbying has its own internal momentum. Corporate managers begin to pay more attention to politics, and in so doing they see more reasons why they should be politically active.

They develop a comfort and a confidence in being politically engaged. And once a company pays some fixed start-up costs, the marginal costs of additional political activity decline. Lobbyists find new issues, companies get drawn into new battles, and new coalitions and networks emerge. Managers see value in political engagement they did not see before.

Lobbying is sticky. Lobbyists drive this process. They teach companies to see the value in political activity. They also benefit from an information asymmetry that allows them to highlight information, issues, and advocacy strategies that can collectively make the strongest case for continued and expanded political engagement.

Because corporate managers depend on lobbyists for both their political information and strategic advice, lobbyists are well-positioned to push companies towards increased lobbying over time. But what effect has it all had on public policy?

Social science research on political influence has found no relationship between political resources and likelihood of success. However, the lack of a direct, statistically significant correlation does not mean that there is no influence. It just means that the influence is unpredictable. The policy process is neither a vending machine nor an auction. Outcomes cannot be had for reliable prices. Policy does not go to the highest bidder. Politics is far messier, and far more interesting than such simplistic models might suggest.

And almost certainly, the increased competition for political outcomes has made it even more unpredictable. Sometimes lobbying can be very influential, but its influence is contingent on so many confounding factors that it does not show up reliably in regression analysis.

Yet, the study of influence is a fundamental question of politics. Rather than looking for vote buying or expecting resources to correlate predictability with policy success, we must think bigger. We must understand the ways in which increases in lobbying activity shape the policymaking environment, and how the changing environment may allow some types of interests to thrive more than others.

The current political environment benefits large corporations for several reasons, which I laid in more detail in Chapter 2, but I will provide a recapitulation here. The first reason is that the increasingly dense and competitive lobbying environment makes any major policy change very difficult. As more actors have more at stake, every attempt to change policy elicits more calls from more voices. In a political system whose many veto points already make change difficult, the proliferation of well-mobilized corporate lobbying interests, all with their own particular positions and asks, means that there are more actors with the capacity to throw more sand into the already creaky machinery of the multistage policy process.

In order for any large-scale change to happen, lobbying generally must be one-sided. To the extent that large corporations benefit from the status quo, a hard-to-change status quo benefits large corporations. But while the crowded political environment may make legislation harder to pass in generally, it also makes the legislation that does pass more complicated more side bargains.

Large companies are more likely to have the resources and know-how to push for technocratic tweaks at the margins, usually out of public view. This contributes to what Steven Teles calls the "complexity and incoherence of our government.

The increasing complexity of policy also makes it more difficult for generalist and generally inexperienced government staffers to maintain an informed understanding of the rules and regulations they are in charge of writing and overseeing. They typically have neither the time to specialize nor the experience to draw on. As a result, staffers must rely more and more on the lobbyists who specialize in particular policy areas.

This puts those who can afford to hire the most experienced and policy-literate lobbyists—generally large companies—at the center of the policymaking process. For example, if a law is passed that corporate interests oppose, relentless industry pressure can be brought to bear on the agencies charged with enforcing that legislation.

Again, in his book, Sen. Furthermore, any final rule may be challenged in courts that are increasingly friendly to corporate forces at the expense of people. In the short time that President Donald Trump has been in office, the revolving door between industry and the federal agencies regulating them is back in full swing thanks to the administration loosening restrictions on lobbyists taking posts at agencies they previously sought to influence on behalf corporate clients.

The independent nonprofit newsroom ProPublica discovered dozens of federally registered lobbyists who were among the first Trump appointees to take positions in federal agencies. For example, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry and health insurance companies are now in key posts at the U. Department of Health and Human Services; a lobbyist for the construction industry who fought wage and worker safety standards now works for the U.

Department of Labor; a lobbyist for the extractive resources industry is now at the U. Department of Energy; and a for-profit college lobbyist who sought to weaken protections for students worked at the U. Department of Education. Captured : The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy tells hard truths about the central threat posed by the rule of the rich—plutocracy—and how it is overwhelming American democracy. Our democratic society must demonstrate its resilience and return to core American principles and values of government that serve the people.

We have the power to demand that Congress break the nexus between Wall Street and Washington that keeps the rules of our economy rigged to benefit the wealthiest few at the expense of the many. Americans can resist the slide to secret political spending and require disclosure for the big money interests behind our toxic politics of personal destruction.

We can demand that lobbyists be prohibited from acting as fundraisers. Ever since our founding as a republic, Americans have fought to expand democratic freedoms and protect democratic society from being corrupted through unchecked private greed and undermined through grotesque inequality. A quick glance, though, revealed it included five managers from the Switzerland-based banking giant Credit Suisse.

The paper's commentary noted the alarm this new call from "ordinary British business" would cause inside government. Corporations are one of the least credible sources of information for the public. What they need, therefore, are authentic, seemingly independent people to carry their message for them. One nuclear lobbyist admitted it spread messages "via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throats".

That's it in a nutshell. The tobacco companies are pioneers of this technique. Their recent campaign against plain packaging has seen them fund newsagents to push the economic case against the policy and encourage trading standards officers to lobby their MPs. British American Tobacco also currently funds the Common Sense Alliance , which is fronted by two ex-policemen and campaigns against "irrational" regulation.

Philip Morris is similarly paying an ex-Met police officer, Will O'Reilly , to front a media campaign linking plain packaging to tobacco smuggling. Some thinktanks will provide companies with a lobbying package: a media-friendly report, a Westminster event, ear-time with politicians. In the mid-noughties, a lobbyist for Standard Life Healthcare, now part of PruHealth, worried about how they could get more people to buy private cover without being seen to undermine the NHS.

The solution: "Get some of the thinktanks to say it, so it's not just us calling for reform, it's outside commentators This has lobbied for more "insurance-based private funding" in the health service. The BBC has also come under repeated recent criticism for inviting commentators from the leading neo-liberal thinktank, the Institute of Economic Affairs IEA , to talk about its opposition to the plain packaging of cigarettes, without disclosing the Institute's tobacco funding.

Leaked documents from Philip Morris also reveal the thinktank is one of its "media messengers" in its anti- plain-packaging campaign. Companies faced with a development that has drawn the ire of a local community will often engage lobbyists to run a public consultation exercise.

Again, not as benign as it sounds. For some in the business, community consultation — anything from running focus groups, exhibitions, planning exercises and public meetings — is a means of flushing out opposition and providing a managed channel through which would-be opponents can voice concerns.

Opportunities to influence the outcome, whether it is preventing an out-of-town supermarket or protecting local health services, are almost always nil. Residents in Barne Barton in Plymouth were asked in what they thought about a metre, PFI-financed incinerator being sited in their neighbourhood, just 62 metres from the nearest house.

Although more than 5, people objected, the waste company's planning application was waved through. That's community consultation. Lobbyists see their battles with opposition activists as "guerilla warfare".

They want government to listen to their message, but ignore counter arguments coming from campaigners, such as environmentalists, who have long been the bane of commercial lobbyists.

So, they need to deal with the "antis". Lobbyists have developed a sliding scale of tactics to neutralise such a threat. Monitoring of opposition groups is common: one lobbyist from agency Edelman talks of the need for "degree monitoring" of the internet, complete with online "listening posts Rebuttal campaigns are frequently employed: "exhausting, but crucial," says Westbourne.

Lobbyists have also long employed divide-and-rule tactics. One Shell strategy proposed to "differentiate interest groups into friends and foes", building relationships with the former, while making it "more difficult for hardcore campaigners to sustain their campaigns". Philip Morris's covert year strategy, codenamed Project Sunrise , intended to "drive a wedge between various anti groups" and "position antis as extremists".

Then there are the more serious activities used primarily when big-money commercial interests are threatened, such as the infiltration of opposition groups, otherwise known as spying. Wikileaks' Global Intelligence Files revealed that groups such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and animal rights organisation Peta were all monitored by global intelligence company Stratfor, once described as a "shadow CIA". Today's world is a digital democracy, say lobbyists. Gone are the old certainties of how decisions were made "by having lunch with an MP, or taking a journalist out," laments one.

It presents a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.