April 7, 2016
Lee Drutman's book, the Business of America is Lobbying, was reviewed in the New York Review of Books:
The question remains: How much influence on Washington’s agenda do business lobbyists have?
A book titled The Business of America Is Lobbying by a highly regarded Washington watchdog, Lee Drutman, is therefore welcome, especially during a new presidential season. It takes some wading through Drutman’s disorganized prose and his sometimes ambivalent feelings about lobbying to find his main messages. But there are two crucial points that are disturbing. The first is that business spends $34 on lobbying for every dollar spent by likely opponents such as labor unions and other interest groups.
The second point is, I think, Drutman’s most important. It may once have been adequate for lobbyists to provide business clients access to the right people. Today, however, they also must develop expertise on major political issues, so that they can provide policymakers with research, draft legislation, and pass on up-to-the-minute information. Lobbyists, not staffers, concludes Drutman, are now the major source of information for Congress and the executive branch on major legislative issues. In one survey, two thirds of congressional staffers said they depend on lobbyists for the information they need to make legislative decisions and pass bills. Thus lobbying grows because Congress, and often the executive branch, needs lobbyists.
To sum up Drutman’s main theme, there is a large imbalance of both lobbying money and expertise that enables lobbyists to influence much of the Washington agenda today. Drutman believes this influence must be trimmed, and he proposes a number of reforms to address the asymmetry of money and expertise—including a new public lobby—that I believe may be effective and will discuss below. But none of Drutman’s proposals has been discussed in the presidential campaigns thus far.