The Impact of Corporate Policy Planning Groups and Director Interlocks on US Congressional Lobbying

A predominant focus in the long-running controversy on the influence of corporate interests on US government decision-making has been the relationship between corporate director interlocks and US electoral campaign contributions, drawing on PAC funding data. This has demonstrated the importance of such contributions to sectors reliant on government concessions in some form often associated with bipartisan hedging strategies, alongside some clusters of interlocks with deep-seated conservative funding patterns. Some studies have gone on to find associations between funding and Congressional voting patterns. But the extent to which contributions amount to policy advocacy are largely circumstantial and the notion of a close link has been hotly contested by protagonists. Since 1995, however, the lobbying of Congressional decision makers has been subject to extensive disclosure requirements, including the formal registration of those engaged in lobbying activity and the publication of quarterly returns detailing clients and income from these, expenditure on lobbying, targets of lobbying and the issues of advocacy. This provides data on the actual domestic policy advocacy undertaken by US corporates and thus producing a more rigorous basis for considering the relationship between directorate interlocks and corporate political activity than the more circumstantial financial contribution data on its own. In this paper, I undertake a longitudinal network analysis drawing from these registers to examine the influence of US corporations within Congressional lobbying in a three-fold manner. First, I examine the relative influence of the main policy planning groups within Congressional lobbying in general over time, identifying the changing position of the major corporate-funded groups by means of a novel ‘divergence’ network metric. Second, I evaluate the position of these groups in the context of associated direct lobbying by their corporate members arguing that these dual-channels provide corporations with amplified influence on the lobbying process compared to other lobbyists. Lastly, I consider the effect of board interlocks between corporations as a cohesive network amidst these dual lobbying channels. The paper makes three theoretical contributions. First, it provides considerable evidence of the dominance of corporate interests over other organised interests in the congressional lobbying process over time and thus further evidence contrary to the general expectations of the classical pluralist argument. Second, it provides insight into mechanisms of corporate cohesion via multiple channels, in contrast to the singular inter-personal social bonds generally studied in this field. Lastly, it disputes recent propositions of the fragmentation and decline of corporate power in the US. The research represents the opening of a fresh approach to the study of corporate political networks which invites a revisiting of older debates on class, elite, sectoral and ideological divides.