Consultant Lobbyists and Public Officials: Selling Policy Expertise or Personal Connections in Canada?
| Author | Maxime Boucher,Christopher A Cooper |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919847132 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2019
Article
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(4) 340 –359
Consultant Lobbyists and
© The Author(s) 2019
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Public Officials: Selling
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919847132
DOI: 10.1177/1478929919847132
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Policy Expertise or Personal
Connections in Canada?
Maxime Boucher1
and Christopher A Cooper2
Abstract
Recent research suggests that there are two different types of lobbyists: those specializing in
providing access to their personal connections with public office holders, and those specializing in
a particular policy sector. This article advances this research by examining the actual behaviour of
consultant lobbyists with data gathered from the Canadian Lobbyist Registry. Specifically, we probe
two questions. First, using four indicators found within the literature, we investigate whether the
behaviour of consultant lobbyists reflects the well-connected generalist or the issue specialist
lobbyist. Second, we examine moving public office holders to see whether administrative officials
– who make greater use of technical information – or politicians and partisan advisors – who are
more interested in partisan/political information – are more likely to continue to be contacted
by consultant lobbyists who contacted them in their previous position. Our results suggest that a
more nuanced understanding of lobbying is required. While the majority of activities by consultant
lobbyists are consistent with providing expertise to policymakers, a sizable minority of lobbyist
activity is consistent with selling access to public office holders. Yet even here, our second analysis
suggests that personal relationships may also involve the provision of expertise.
Keywords
consultant lobbying, peddling, expertise, bureaucracy, Westminster
Accepted: 21 March 2019
Introduction
From Jack Abramoff, to Derek Draper and Karlheinz Schreiber, it seems that lobbyists
have always had a bad rap (Jordan, 1991). Scandals in several liberal democracies, such
as ‘lobbygate’ and ‘cash for access’, have exposed consultant lobbyists using their per-
sonal connections with public office holders (POH) to influence government decisions
1University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada
2University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Corresponding author:
Maxime Boucher, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada.
Email: maxime.boucher@uwaterloo.ca
Boucher and Cooper
341
(Dinan and Miller, 2012; Kaiser, 2010; Miller and Dinan, 2008; Warhurst, 2007). As
opposed to an in-house lobbyist, who is an employee or director of the business or organi-
zation they represent, a consultant (or commercial) lobbyist works for a professional lob-
byist firm and is paid on a contractual basis to represent the interests of a client (Halpin
and Warhurst, 2015). Because the integrity of democracy rests upon citizens holding
equal political rights, some actors strongly decry the ability of former public officials to
sell access to government personnel through the lobbying industry.
In the face of this, however, a number of governments have passed laws to better regu-
late (Chari et al., 2010; Greenwood and Dreger, 2013; Keeling et al., 2017; McGrath,
2008) and support the professionalization of lobbying (McGrath, 2005). International
organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) (2005, 2014) have also encouraged countries to regulate and legitimate lobbying
activities. According to this perspective, not only is lobbying described as a legitimate
activity stemming from the right to petition the government, but it is also held to be an
important source of information for decision-makers. In the contemporary regulatory-
(Majone, 1996) and welfare-state (Esping-Andersen, 1990), effective governance fre-
quently requires collaboration between actors in the public and private realms (Laumann
and Knoke, 1987; Peters and Pierre, 1998).
Needless to say, given these differing perspectives, the relationship that lobbyists have
with public officials has become a hot topic of debate. Recent research in political science
has helped us comprehend these opposing views, by making a simple, but important
claim: lobbyists are not a homogeneous group. Lobbyists have different competencies
and specialize in different services. Lobbyists therefore offer different benefits to the
organized interests that they lobby on behalf of, and importantly, they also have different
relationships with government officials.
Whereas some lobbyists, largely stemming from their personal connections with gov-
ernment personnel, specialize in navigating the political process, others, largely in-house
lobbyists, specialize in a particular policy sector and provide substantive expertise to poli-
cymakers. Ideal-type lobbyists are those that LaPira and Thomas (2017) have recently
labelled the ‘K Street Kingpin’ and the ‘Librarian’, respectively. However, while ideal-
typologies improve our understanding of lobbying by drawing our attention to possible
patterns of difference, questions remain concerning the extent to which these analytical
constructs reflect the actual behaviour of lobbyists, especially in countries outside the
United States, where we do not find as much research on lobbying.
Furthermore, as with many ideal-typologies (Aberbach et al., 1981; Dahl, 1971), the
character of the phenomena as it actually exists may straddle analytical categories;
nuances and hybrids are not uncommon. Accordingly, another body of research suggests
that distinctions between lobbyists who sell access to public officials, and those who
provide expertise, may overlook how personal connections and expertise are an intercon-
nected aspect of lobbying (Bertrand et al., 2014; Chalmers, 2013; McGrath, 2017;
Milbrath, 1963; Wise, 2007).
This article advances this research by empirically examining the activity of the consult-
ant lobbyist population in Canada. Specifically, we ask two questions. First, drawing upon
the work of LaPira and Thomas (2017), we investigate whether the behaviour of consultant
lobbyists reflects the well-connected generalist or the issue specialist lobbyist using single-
item indicators. Second, we examine the extent and nature of the enduring relationships
that consultant lobbyists maintain with POHs who moved from one department or agency
to another. Knowing that within Canada’s Westminster system of government, political
342
Political Studies Review 17(4)
and administrative personnel operate in different realms of governing, where the former
are generally more interested in partisan-political information, and the latter are more
interested in technical-administrative information, we empirically examine whether con-
sultant lobbyists are more likely to maintain contact with moving POHs in political or
administrative offices through a regression analysis. In other words, we examine whether
the relationships that consultant lobbyists maintain with POHs support, rather than oppose,
the provision of technical policy information.
We conduct our empirical analyses using a dataset measuring the contacts that the
entire population of consultant lobbyists have had with federal POHs between 2008 and
2016. The results from the first analysis reveal patterns of behaviour among the consult-
ant lobbyist population that suggest the presence of both types of lobbyists. Importantly,
however, the patterns are not as expected. The majority of consultant lobbyists behave in
ways that are consistent with issue-specific lobbying rather than ‘access peddling’ lobby-
ing. This is surprising, considering that most lobbyists with previous experience in gov-
ernment are consultant lobbyists (LaPira and Thomas, 2017: 44).
The results from the second analysis show that consultant lobbyists maintain approxi-
mately twice as many contacts with elite bureaucrats who have changed jobs than with
moving politicians. Overall, our results suggest that the distinction between providing
policy expertise and peddling personal connections, while useful, may also have some
important limitations in describing the actual behaviour of lobbyists. Specifically, while
characterizations of lobbying as being exclusively either ‘access peddling’ or ‘informa-
tion exchange’ may describe the behaviour of some lobbyists, it may not adequately
reflect how personal connections support the provision of expert information.
The remainder of this article is organized into six sections. The first summarizes debate
over the nature of lobbying and the relationship that lobbyists have with POHs. The sec-
ond section presents four indicators we use to investigate the presence of two ideal-type
lobbyists. In addition, we explain how we measure whether the relationships that consult-
ant lobbyists have with POHs may involve the provision of expertise. The third section
describes the dataset used to conduct our empirical analyses. The results from the analy-
ses are presented in section ‘Data and Methods’ and discussed in section ‘Results’. The
conclusion considers the contributions this study makes to research on lobbying, specifi-
cally the usefulness of ideal-type distinctions between generalist and specialist lobbyists,
and reflects upon what the results say about the nature of governance in contemporary
parliamentary democracies. The...
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