Sept. 26, 2025
Lee Drutman was quoted in The New York Times on the influence of corporate lobbying in politics.
One clear measure of this was their behavior in Washington. Through at least the 1960s, a large majority of corporate lobbying was a collective enterprise — it happened through trade associations, not lobbyists that companies hired directly. That had completely reversed itself a generation later. In 1998, the typical industry spent about 63 percent of its lobbying money on its own lobbyists rather than trade associations, according to the political scientist Lee Drutman. By 2012, that portion had jumped to 71 percent.
“Shareholder capitalism puts intense pressure on quarterly earnings,” Mr. Drutman said in an interview. And that turned into pressure to gain an advantage over competitors with the government. “It becomes a real arms race,” he said.