Scholars of interest group politics have frequently puzzled over the question: Who influences public policymaking, and how? While this is a nuanced question, the short answer provided by Revolving Door Lobbying is that “special interests are not in the business of buying policy outcomes. They are in the market to cover their political backsides” (p. 3). With these opening words, Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas succinctly begin to build a case for lobbying understood as political insurance, rather than bribery.
The book’s most important contribution, however, is the theoretical and empirical distinction that LaPira and Thomas make between conventional lobbyists and revolving door lobbyists. Rather than treating lobbyists as a monolithic set of interchangeable professionals, as most previous research has done, they assert that “different kinds of lobbyists provide different kinds of political insurance coverage” (p. 5). The authors set up two lobbyist prototypes: the “Librarian,” and the “K Street Kingpin.” The Librarian is a substantive expert; she has worked in the field and provides the quintessential lobbying service of offering an informational subsidy to legislators. In contrast, the K Street Kingpin often provides lobbying services to a variety of interest groups, across a surprising breadth of issue areas, and his main contribution is process expertise.
In order to distinguish between these two archetypes, and the associated benefits that companies may get from employing them, LaPira and Thomas rely on two sources of data. The primary data source for the book comes from Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) Reports, and specifically, those reports made during the year 2008. LDA data are unwieldy at best and suffer from a myriad of inherent limitations, which I will mention. However, it is also the only systematically available information we have on lobbying behavior at the federal level. In order to supplement this data, the authors conducted original semi-structured interviews with experts and lobbyists in Washington.
LaPira and Thomas’s treatment of the LDA data is methodologically sophisticated and offers considerable leverage toward answering their primary research question regarding the differences between revolving door lobbyists and their more common counterparts. They demonstrate that there is a strong market demand for revolving door lobbyists, that these lobbyists have more clients and are more likely to work at major firms, and that they work on a greater diversity of issues than their non-revolving-door peers. Yet, given these facts, these revolving door lobbyists also appear to lack the deep substantive issue expertise that has been the foundational assumption for explaining the interactions between lobbyists and legislators.
LaPira and Thomas take an alternate approach by asking why it is that interest groups hire lobbyists. In order to explain this, they develop a transactional model of lobbying. They conceive interested organizations as hiring lobbyists for the following reasons: 1) purchasing politically specific human assets; 2) solving fundamental problems, such as political uncertainty and policy ambiguity; 3) optimizing agency costs (process knowledge and substantive expertise); and 4) minimizing asset transaction costs (p. 69). Given those possible reasons for hiring lobbyists, the authors ask: What does the political environment demand? They show that as government increasingly relies on expertise from interest groups, the “librarian” has proliferated, but the “kingpin” has become far more valuable. Why? Because the number of meaningful access points in government has declined considerably under the condition of strong party control. This model explains why the K Street Kingpin can demand such a high price, without assuming that he is any more “effective” at producing policy outcomes than any other lobbyist. Interest groups are not buying efficacy so much as opportunity. The Kingpin may “win” at the same rate as a conventional lobbyist; but because of the Kingpin’s relationships and process knowledge, his clients will simply have better access to leadership (important in an environment of increasingly centralized party control) and more opportunities to influence legislation, since Kingpins are more likely to gain a seat at the proverbial legislative “table.” They do not win because they are bribing legislators; rather, they are simply in the right place at the right time (p. 160).
Throughout the book, LaPira and Thomas compare the self-reported work of conventional and revolving door lobbyists and find systematic and significant differences. Chapter 7, in particular, shows that revolving door lobbyists earn more revenue; represent bigger, more corporate, and more economically diverse clienteles; and engage in a wider variety of issues (p. 178).
The major challenge with the LDA data that this research relies on is its frequent omission, messiness, and general lack of specificity, a fact about which the authors are quite frank. While Revolving Door Lobbying provides us with new methodological approaches to organizing and using what LDA data is available, it also leaves several questions unanswered: Do Kingpins and Librarians actually behave differently in their interpersonal interactions with political actors? Once they gain a seat at the table, do they take different strategic approaches to gaining their respective policy preferences? Questions such as these require interviews to flesh out the general outline that quantitative data provides. LaPira and Thomas conducted interviews but placed very little of the content from those interviews into the book itself. I hope this indicates that there will be a follow-up book to come, one that will flesh out some of the more interpersonal differences between Kingpins and Librarians that impact their success rates and their value on Capitol Hill.
LaPira and Thomas move the literature on lobbying in a productive and important direction with this book; they highlight the “other side” of the influence market: not what lobbyists provide to legislators but what lobbyists provide to their clients. They find that, in the face of declining congressional capacity and the rise of strong political parties in government, there is an increased demand for process-oriented lobbyists who serve as insurance for corporate America against a political process that has become increasingly “unorthodox and chaotic” (p. 11). Their research also represents a cautionary tale for interest groups wishing to gain representation in Congress. Like health insurance or car insurance, consumers of political insurance are susceptible to buying far more political coverage than they actually need. The picture painted by LaPira and Thomas should encourage interest groups to be somewhat conservative in hiring lobbyists; otherwise they may be getting comprehensive coverage when they really needed collision only.
