Lobbying in the US: The revolving door system and how it functions
- vic.ko
- Nov 28, 2019
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 16, 2019
Source: Sam Ward for POLITICO (https://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/barack-obama-revolving-door-lobbying-217042)
Researching the Informal governance in the United States one can notice that it is mostly represented by lobbying which exists in different forms. There is a fine line between this activity being harmlessly legal and causing serious problems due to its corrupt schemes. To prevent possible negative consequences lobbying is juridically regulated by the government in terms of legislative acts. Yet, there exists one form of lobbying which is hard to control and can possibly lead to corruption. This blog post is dedicated to one of the most popular lobbying practices in the United States: the revolving door system. First, we are going to find the definition of this phenomenon and see how it functions within the American system. As part of understanding the functioning of the revolving door we are analysing the benefits and possible disadvantages of the revolving door. Finally, we are looking at the statistical data to understand how successful this informal practice has been over the last decade.
The revolving door (p. 1) is the process when the former officials or legislators work in lobbyists firms and use their connections to promote their clients’ interests in the governmental structures (Belousov 2019: 565). In other words, they "walk through that door from their positions in the government" (McGann 2016: 62) to the private sector corporations. This movement happens in both directions, thus, the name of the phenomenon - the revolving door, which permanently rotates letting people walk through and obtain the good positions. Important notice that need to be made here is that the corporations of the private sector not always have to be closely related to politics. The former officials often find jobs in the business sector, transnational corporations, such as Google, or independent think tasks. Yet, the most important connections established through the revolving door system are the ones between the US Congress and the K Street (Belousov 2019: 118), a place where the majority of lobbyists have their offices. One may ask: what is the aim of lobbyists in the Capitol Hill? The answer lies in the procedure of policy-making system of the US. According to Haar (2012: 118) when a new bill or legislative proposal becomes a law it needs to get through approval of multiple committees. Each group has its different, often overlapping ways of jurisdictions and interests, so do the lobbyists who’s main intention is to promote their business interests while they have access to power.
Since the revolving door system has increased its importance in the lawmaking in the United States (Haar 2012: 11), it should be mentioned that sometimes it is impossible to avoid the informal governance. That is why in this section we are going to investigate what benefits and downsides the revolving door system has. As for the beneficial sides of the phenomenon, the most important one is that there is a constant exchange of human resources between the public and private sector with the result that more competent personnel comes to work for the government (Brezis, Cariolle 2017: 54). The lobbyists tend to perceive themselves as "servants working on behalf of their clients" (Wise 2007), therefore, they need to be the specialists in their area. Second, people who went through that door know how the government functions. Thus, they know how to protect the business they work for from the governmental influence if it is needed. Finally, talking about the positive implications on the legislative process, we are going to name two go them. First, due to the technical expertise of the so called "wonk-lobbyists" the efficiency of the policy-making process increases (Waxman 2009), which consequently leads to the second: the rational use of the staff resources.
However, despite of this informal governance practice being legal and having advantages it has its negative sides that need to be controlled. First of all, the most obvious of them is that revolving door can easily lead to corrupt activities, e.g. when former colleagues-lobbyists help each other out in gratitude. Next, according to Haar (2012) who deals with the revolving door in terms of the legislation process, the biggest downside is "the lack of good policy-making". Since the individuals who work in government and the ones who worked there have good connections, they are the ones holding the decision making power. Thus, the policy-making will be represented only by one interest group leading to profitable legislations for lobbyists businesses.
Owing to the downsides of revolving door system, the government had to come up with regulations, such as the cooling off period. In fact, the undertaken measures seem to be not successful as the statistics show. A change of power is always leading to a change of most governmental employees. And where do the former officials land? Right, they go to the public sector. To understand for what extent the revolving door system is present in the United States I chose some statistical data from the academic sources and the open-access information from Google.
First, let us take a look at the phenomenon in the highest level of government. According to Haar (2012) the Centre for Responsible Politics listed 3,850 individuals who changed their jobs in public sector to private or vice versa between 1998 and 2009. Additionally, there were recorded 926 lobbyists who improved their legislative skills while working in leading parliamentary committees.
The second source that provides disappointing statistics is Google. One of the two projects on transparency launched in 2016 by Campaign for Accountability demonstrated a visualisation of revolving door system between Google and the US government (Orlowski, 2016). The information is shown via an interactive "revolving door" (scroll down to find it) telling the observes the name of the lobbyist, the year of his movement from one sector to another and the position which he or she occupied before and occupies now. As we can see, the traffic is busy in both directions, yet, there were registered three times more moves from the government to Google, which could be explained through the easier access to any wanted job for the former governmental employee.
The numbers revealed above are truly terrifying, just as the fact that this practice is legal. So, it turns out that the US politics are not so clear as they seem to be from the first sight! Did you know about it? Let us know in the comment section below.
Belousov, A. (2019). Problema vrashchaiushchikhsia dverei v SSHA: mezhdu lobbismom i institutsional’noi korruptsiei. Aktual’nye problemy nauchnogo obespechenia gosudarstvennoi politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii v oblasti protivodeistvia korruptsii, (1), 564-576. doi: 10.17506/articles.anticorruption.2018.564576
Brezis E., Cariolle J. (2017). Financial Sector Regulation and the Revolving Door in US Commercial Banks, N. Schofield, G. Caballero (eds.) State, Institutionsand Democracy. Contributions of Political Economy, New York, Springer, pp. 53-78.
Haar, R. (2012). Informal governance in the United States Capitol Hill networks. In Christiansen, T. et al. (2012) International Handbook on Informal Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, pp. 117-134
Kilgore, E. (2015). The doors revolve again [online] Washington Monthly. Available at: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2015/02/13/the-doors-revolve-again/ [Accessed: 05/12/2019]
McGann, J. (2016). The Revolving Door. In The Fifth Estate: Think Tanks, Public Policy, and Governance (pp. 62-78). Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt1gpccjc.6[Accessed: 09/12/2019]
Orlowski, A. (2016). Revealed: The revolving door between Google and the US govt – in pictures [online] The Register UK, Business. Politics. Available at: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/29/google_transparency_project/ [Accessed: 09/12/2019]
Waxman, H. (2009), The Waxman Report, How Congress Really Works, New York and
Boston, MA: Twelve.
Wise, K. (2007), ‘Lobbying and relationship management: the K Street connection’, Journal of Public Relations Research, 19 (4), 357–76.
Shocking!