Summer Reading: Lee Drutman's "The Business of America Is Lobbying"

Lee Drutman’s The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (2015) is an excellent book about corporate lobbying at the federal level. Drutman is especially good on the reasons for the growth of this lobbying, particularly the reasons why this lobbying is “sticky.” Since corporations and their associations spend more on lobbying than on campaigns, this is where the action is, but it is an area that has not been this well covered. One of the extra bonuses of Drutman’s book is his unusual ability to write organized chapters, sections, and paragraphs that allow the reader to skim. This book is full of data, but you can easily read Drutman’s summaries when you wish.

Drutman also has some creative recommendations for dealing with lobbying by balancing it and making it more transparent rather than trying to limit it.

But for local government ethics purposes, what is so fascinating about Drutman's book is how little it applies to local government lobbying. At the federal level, the players are primarily professional lobbyists, either contract and in-house, either working for corporations and for associations, who keep growing in numbers and in their need to do more and more lobbying to keep the food flowing into the trough. At the federal level, the focus is on bills and regulations. At the federal level, there is a level of transparency.

At the local level, there are few professional lobbyists, most of the lobbying focuses on contracts, permits, licenses, and big projects, and there is little or no transparency. For more on the differences, see the draft of my chapter on local lobbying oversight. The draft looks at a couple of Drutman's recommendations (from papers he'd written), which would be of use primarily in big cities and counties.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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