Lobbying: fantasy,reality or both? A health care public policy case study

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for lobbying as interpersonal rhetorical communication based on the tenets of symbolic convergence theory (SCT). SCT is a general theory of communication in the symbolic interactionism paradigm. Nowhere in the extant communication literature, including the scholarly public relations research, is lobbying explicated in this way. This paper utilises a health care public policy case study to illustrate SCT in lobbying practice. The emphasis here is on how lobbyists use homo narrans, or human storytelling, in influential face‐to‐face information exchange with public policy decision makers to be persuasive on behalf of their clients. The ultimate aim of this paper is to build the current body of theoretical and practical knowledge about lobbying, to advance more positive perceptions of lobbyists and lobbying and to improve the practice of lobbying in producing effective public policy outcomes. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Politicized CSR: How corporate political activity (mis-)uses political CSR

In this article, we posit that corporate political activities (CPA) such as lobbying make use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to advance instrumental goals. We juxtapose the theoretical foundations of the normative concept of political CSR and the strategic notion of nonmarket strategy to show that they are in opposition conceptually regarding the role of corporations in public policy. Using a systematic theoretical comparison along seven dimensions, we discuss the juxtapositions and identify the common ground of the two theories. Building on examples from the alcohol industry, we describe how CPA uses instrumental CSR to advance goals in public policy—we call this politicized CSR. Hence, we illustrate the shift from political to politicized CSR, a misuse of CSR for purposes of CPA, and discuss consequences for the theory and practice of public affairs and CSR.     

Putting the “Public” Back in Public Values Research: Designing Participation to Identify and Respond to Values

This article seeks to put the “public” back in public values research by theorizing about the potential of direct citizen participation to assist with identifying and understanding public values. Specifically, the article explores eight participatory design elements and offers nine propositions about how those elements are likely to affect the ability of administrators to identify and understand public values with regard to a policy conflict. The article concludes with a brief discussion about potential directions for future research.     

Targeting the lobbying effort: The importance of local government lobbying

Abstract Local government is subject to extensive lobbying, which is reasonable given the greater importance of the local public sector in large welfare states. Most of the scholarly attention has been focused on lobbying at the national level, often addressing the impact of interest groups on public policies. This article discusses a decision–making model where interest groups optimize their lobbying efforts given the way that different local governments and individual politicians respond to these activities. A number of propositions are tested on the basis of data from Norwegian local government. Contrary to prior theorizing, we do not find that representatives seeking re–election are contacted more frequently by interest groups. Interest groups target their lobbying activities toward politicians who are members of the relevant council committees, and they exert stronger pressure on members of the executive board and active representatives who perceive themselves as influential. Inter–municipal differences are also of importance: The lobbying activities are more intensive where electoral participation is low and in the larger urban municipalities, while the size of legislatures and the strength of the local political leadership affect lobbying efforts negatively. Interest groups tend to be more active in the richer local governments. The demands of the residential population impact weakly on lobbying efforts.     

What the Secretary Said Next: ‘Public Rhetorical Leadership’ in the Australian Public Service

Every year, senior departmental secretaries in Australia deliver keynote speeches to a range of audiences. What are these secretaries talking about, and to whom are they directing their comments? This article will examine keynote addresses by the secretaries of the two key central agencies in Australia – the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and The Treasury – over the calendar years 2009 and 2010. I argue that ‘public rhetorical leadership’ by secretaries poses challenges for traditional understandings of Westminster governance. Utilising the concepts of public value theory, the significance of this ‘public rhetorical leadership’ is assessed in terms of its impacts on policy implementation and questions of accountability.     

Targeting the lobbying effort: The importance of local government lobbying

Local government is subject to extensive lobbying, which is reasonable given the greater importance of the local public sector in large welfare states. Most of the scholarly attention has been focused on lobbying at the national level, often addressing the impact of interest groups on public policies. This article discusses a decision–making model where interest groups optimize their lobbying efforts given the way that different local governments and individual politicians respond to these activities. A number of propositions are tested on the basis of data from Norwegian local government. Contrary to prior theorizing, we do not find that representatives seeking re–election are contacted more frequently by interest groups. Interest groups target their lobbying activities toward politicians who are members of the relevant council committees, and they exert stronger pressure on members of the executive board and active representatives who perceive themselves as influential. Inter–municipal differences are also of importance: The lobbying activities are more intensive where electoral participation is low and in the larger urban municipalities, while the size of legislatures and the strength of the local political leadership affect lobbying efforts negatively. Interest groups tend to be more active in the richer local governments. The demands of the residential population impact weakly on lobbying efforts.     

Inside versus outside lobbying: How the institutional framework shapes the lobbying behaviour of interest groups

Different types of interest groups use different lobbying strategies. This article presents an investigation of this already well‐established hypothesis once more, but additionally proposes that the institutional framework of the country in which interest groups operate also influences their lobbying behaviour. More specifically, it is shown that groups working in the interest of the public are better integrated into the policy‐making process when direct democratic instruments, such as referendums, occur regularly (as in Switzerland) than when referendums are the exception (Germany). The article demonstrates that Swiss cause groups – often also referred to as ‘public interest groups’ in the literature – use a more balanced mixture of insider and outsider strategies than their German peers, but also that this moderating effect cannot be found for specific interest groups, such as industry groups or unions.     

Legitimacy through targeted transparency? Regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimate and accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with the democratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solution to increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulation regime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining it and complying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency‐based regulatory regimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as a legitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Do stakeholders perceive the transparency‐based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form of regulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency and proposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluate the legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374 stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The findings describe a transparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizens criticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register's performance as a transparency instrument. The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups about supranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benefits of transparency, but identify few organisation‐level benefits. Organisations that are policy insiders incur more transparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategies and does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in the Register's regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfect regulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support increased transparency and information disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’ participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountable and legitimate supranational lobbying.     

Engaging in Small Talk: Nanotechnology Policy and Dialogue Processes in the UK and Australia

This article discusses the phenomena of nanotechnology, and notes that despite high investment levels for global research and development, the public presently understands neither the implications of this emerging technology nor how it might be best governed. It considers the notion of the public interest and its place in the public policy cycle, and notes some of the specific challenges posed by this new technology. Adopting a comparative jurisdictional approach, this article maps a range of policy and dialogue activities currently underway within the United Kingdom and Australia and concludes that policy dialogue is an essential component of public policy development for all emerging technologies. While the Australian government is currently beginning this process, compared to countries such as the United Kingdom, such efforts here are still embryonic. A fuller engagement in wide‐ranging public debate is suggested as a part of protecting the public interest.     

The Theory and Practice of “Nudging”: Changing Health Behaviors

Many of the most significant challenges in health care—such as smoking, overeating, and poor adherence to evidence‐based guidelines—will only be resolved if we can influence behavior. The traditional policy tools used when thinking about influencing behavior include legislation, regulation, and information provision. Recently, policy analysts have shown interest in policies that “nudge” people in particular directions, drawing on advances in understanding that behavior is strongly influenced in largely automatic ways by the context within which it is placed. This article considers the theoretical basis for why nudges might work and reviews the evidence in health behavior change. The evidence is structured according to the Mindspace framework for behavior change. The conclusion is that insights from behavioral economics offer powerful policy tools for influencing behavior in health care. This article provides public administration practitioners with an accessible summary of this literature, putting these insights into practical use.     

“Not Imminent in My Domain!” County Leaders’ Attitudes toward Eminent Domain Decisions

Eminent domain is an urgent problem facing local government administrators and scholars throughout the United States. However, the literature is sparse regarding how local leaders make decisions on this hot‐button issue. A 2006 Government Accountability Office report noted a lack of data about local governments’ use of their eminent domain authority. A survey of county managers in North Carolina was conducted to redress this apparent knowledge gap. Although the findings are primarily generalizable only to other Dillon’s rule states, such data demonstrate that eminent domain applies more often for “narrow” (public use) purposes, such as water and sewer systems, than for “broad” (public good) purposes, such as economic development. Current and future property considerations also influence eminent domain decisions. [A] law that takes property from A, and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it. —Associate Justice Samuel Chase, majority opinion, Calder v. Bull (1798)     

Commercial Lobbying in Australia: Exploring the Australian Lobby Register

Politicians and policy makers routinely engage with lobbyists and see them as crucial agents in the political process. But how much do we really know about the Australian lobby system? Although there are a range of reviews of lobby regulation schemes and discussions about the work of lobbyists, a comprehensive contemporary picture of the commercial lobbying system in Australia is missing. Using data from the ‘federal lobby register’, this article sets out to map the commercial lobbying scene at the national level. Using this as a backdrop, the article goes on to discuss what questions this raises and how we might develop a deeper understanding of the commercial lobbying system in Australia.     

“Civic discovery” as a rhetorical strategy

Much research in the field of public management is distinguished by its rejection of the politics-administration dichotomy and its emphasis on the public manager's responsibility for political management. By rejecting the dichotomy, however, scholars in public management have reopened debate over an old question: Why is it right for public managers to exercise political power in the policymaking process? It is argued that the dichotomy served as a rhetorical strategy for allaying public concern about bureaucratic power, and that public management scholars must now invent a new strategy to take its place. This article evaluates one strategy, proposed by Moore and Reich, which is premised on the idea that managers may legitimize the exercise of discretion by showing it to be consistent with a mandate that is produced through a fair process of deliberation. It is argued that the new strategy may overestimate the ability to build mandates, the ability to build deliberative processes that are manifestly fair, and the willingness of dissentient citizens to defer to such mandates. The new strategy will also bind public managers to a demonstration of neutrality not unlike that imposed by the politics-administration dichotomy.     

“The Big Society,” Public Expenditure,and Volunteering

The debate on volunteering has paid insufficient attention to the relationship between public spending and volunteering. The importance of this relationship is highlighted by the British government's “Big Society” plan, which asserts that an increase in volunteering will compensate for the withdrawal of public agencies and spending. This idea is based on the widely held belief that a high degree of government intervention decreases voluntary activities. This article uses a multidisciplinary approach to improve understanding of how public spending affects the decision to volunteer. A theoretical model conceptualizes this relationship in terms of time donation by employed individuals. The model is tested empirically through an econometric analysis of two survey data sets and interpretative analysis of narratives of local volunteers and public professionals. The results suggest that volunteering is likely to decline when government intervention decreases and that a collaborative approach to sustaining volunteering is needed.     

Lobbying the state or the market? A framework to study civil society organizations’ strategic behavior

This article lays out a framework for the conditions under which a civil society organization lobbies the state and when it turns to the market. This strategic choice cannot be understood solely from within current frameworks of lobbying strategies; insights from interest group studies must be complemented with the social movement literature's understanding of market‐based strategies. We build an overarching framework by extending the inside and outside lobbying dichotomy to include strategies that target the market. We also argue that it is crucial to understand the relations between both lobbying venues, as their relative power affects the choice not only between inside or outside lobbying, but also between the state or the market. The result is a richer framework more suited to capture the breadth of contemporary civil society organization lobbying behavior and, more importantly, to facilitate the comparative assessment of different strategic choices in future empirical research.     

Who Lobbies Whom? Special Interest Politics under Alternative Electoral Systems

Why do some interest groups lobby politicians and others lobby bureaucrats? We theorize lobbying venue choices and intensity as a function of contract enforceability with policy makers, politicians, or bureaucrats. We argue that organizational structures of interest groups, in particular, whether they are centralized or decentralized, substantially affect their lobbying strategies because they are associated with different ability to monitor and enforce contracts with policy makers and punish them when they fail. We further demonstrate that the effect of centralized versus decentralized structure on venue choices is conditional on the types of electoral system: majoritarian, semiproportional (single, nontransferable vote: SNTV), or proportional representation systems. We test this argument using longitudinal survey data on lobbying which span two decades and cover around 250 interest groups in various sectors and issue areas in Japan. The results lend strong support to our argument about contract enforceability under alternative electoral systems.     

Bridging the Public Service Motivation and Calling Literatures

Public administration research suggests there may be disparity in the extent to which public servants experience their work as a calling. The purpose of this article is to better illustrate and integrate calling research, which grows out of the positive organizational scholarship movement, into how we understand public service motives. The calling scholarship offers a productive way to view differences in public servants' orientations toward their work. Integrating calling into the public administration scholarship—particularly the public service motivation scholarship—provides insights to researchers and managers about how to help employees discover a deeper sense of meaningfulness in their work. In presenting the arguments and corresponding conceptual framework, the authors seek to supplement rather than replace the public service motivation construct. The authors articulate a research agenda that they believe will strengthen and enrich research on public servants' experience with their work.     

Pluralism,corporatism and perception of corruption

When people know who is influencing the elected politicians and they may ‘put the rascals out’ in case they feel that the incumbents are corrupt, ceteris paribus, their perception of the level of corruption should not be affected by lobbying. If on the other hand people are not sure which or how many actors are influencing public policy and they are not able to hold the government truly accountable as interest group influence is constant with different governments, people will be more likely to perceive the government as corrupted. The former system is a characteristic of corporatism and the latter of pluralism. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that interest groups with resources such as business groups or firms in pluralist systems are more influential than groups with few resources. Thus, people may perceive pluralist policy‐making system as more corrupt than corporatist policy‐making system where fewer visible actors have more or less equal weight in the policy‐making process. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Qualitative Experteninterviews in Internationalen Organisationen

The article addresses the question of how to categorize different expert interviews in empirical research on international organizations. First of all, we discuss what is unique in analysing International Organizations. Afterwards, four different types of expert interviews are distinguished depending on the interest in the subject. Finally, the article connects the typology of expert interviews with the discussion of the organizational turn in IO-studies and discusses the consequences of the methodological approach proposed in this article. The findings are underlaid by case studies from research on international organizations.     

Motivational Bases and Emotional Labor: Assessing the Impact of Public Service Motivation

Emotional labor has become an important topic in the study of organizational behavior, but no research has examined how it is affected in individuals’ motivational bases. Public administration scholars have started to study this concept, but empirical studies are still in their infancy. Focusing on a particular type of motivational base—public service motivation (PSM), this article assesses how PSM and its three dimensions (attraction to policy making, commitment to public interest, and compassion) affect two common emotional labor activities (surface acting and deep acting). Using data from a survey of certified public management students, the results show that PSM is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting. Among the PSM dimensions, attraction to policy making is positively associated with surface acting; compassion is negatively associated with surface acting and positively associated with deep acting; and commitment to public interest is not associated with surface acting or deep acting.