Who is corporate lobbyists

University Press Scholarship Online. Sign in. Not registered? Sign up. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. More Corporate lobbyists are everywhere in Washington. October 06, What do an adman and an investigative reporter have to teach us about corporations and society?

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More From Forbes. Nov 11, , am EST. Edit Story. Something is out of balance in Washington. Today, the biggest companies have upwards of lobbyists representing them, allowing them to be everywhere, all the time. Of the organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business. One has to go back to the Gilded Age to find business in such a dominant political position in American politics.

While it is true that even in the more pluralist s and s, political representation tilted towards the well-off , lobbying was almost balanced by today's standards. Labor unions were much more important, and the public-interest groups of the s were much more significant actors. And very few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the s.

To the extent that businesses did lobby in the s and s typically through associations , they were clumsy and ineffective. Things are quite different today. The evolution of business lobbying from a sparse reactive force into a ubiquitous and increasingly proactive one is among the most important transformations in American politics over the last 40 years. Rather, business lobbying has built itself up over time, and the self-reinforcing quality of corporate lobbying has increasingly come to overwhelm every other potentially countervailing force.