Lobbyists Out of the Shadows

What's the difference between lobbying and bribing? This often asked question reveals the confusion surrounding a phenomenon well known to social scientists studying democratic systems. Let's be clear: there cannot exist a democracy without citizens and representatives of civil society affecting decision-making outside the electoral process. While corruption is illegal, interest groups pressuring for a particular set of social preferences are perfectly legal. The legitimacy and relevance of lobbies derives from those intensive preferences which cannot be expressed only once every few years to coincide with elections. Robert Dahl, one of the biggest names in the study of modern democracies, has often emphasized that functioning democracies must be able to take such preferences into account. Representatives of business and labor, for instance, must be able to set forth their preferences in the various phases of the decision-making process, when a political agenda is set or a public policy is formulated.

If lobbies are legitimate in a democracy, they still need to be regulated in order to avoid a structural imbalance in the representation of interests. The only way to avoid over-representation of certain interests at the expense of others is to systematically regulate lobbying, by making lobbies transparent and accountable. On this aspect, contemporary democracies display high variability: unlike most Western democracies, the United States have long had binding norms regulating the activities of Political Action Committees (PACs) in Washington. This does not mean the US has solved the issue of over-representation. According to Schattschneider's classical critique of lobbying, the American pluralist society is like a choir where only upper-class voices get heard. European democracies have sought to overcome the pluralist model by embracing neocorporatist systems, where some organized interests are considered structurally more important than others. Also in this case, the demands of certain groups are not heard, such as in the case of short-term workers having non-standard labor contracts vs. unionized long-term employees working in large companies.

In the context of (either pluralist or neocorporatist) representative democracies, it's the government that must balance party interests supported by electoral preferences and intensive preferences expressed by social pressure groups. And such government will certainly benefit from tight regulation that makes incorrect (and corruptive) behavior stand out, and makes the presence of interest groups visible, thereby facilitating the process of selecting the most appropriate interlocutors when taking legitimate decisions.