Is Corruption a Problem in Advocacy? An American-German Comparison

The public has an ambiguous if not mystifying attitude towards lobbying in many countries. Behind closed doors, lobbyists, so the assumption by many, turn the tables of politics to the particular interests of their employers at the expense of the public, which some see as corrupt or at least illegitimate behavior. Even the literature suggests a relationship between lobbying and corruption – either as substitutes to each other, or as complementary phenomena. Lobbyists could use corruption as a means of political influence if lobbying is unsuccessful. Alternatively, advocates can use their professional and trust-based relationships with political stakeholders to engage in corruption. In the present study, I explore to which extent these public and scientific notions might be justified. Using a new dataset of 80 elite interviews with German and American in-house lobbyists of actively lobbying companies carried out in 2018 and 2019, I, firstly, analyze which formal and informal strategies lobbyists use and how effective they think they are to achieve their policy goals. Combined with qualitative information about the self-understanding of their roles as lobbyists, this will shed light if the public doubts about lobbying are justified. Secondly, I analyze to what extent lobbyists see corruption as a problem in politics generally and especially in advocacy by examining the determinants of their perceived spread of corruption in politics. The predictors are on firm-level and include the sector of the company, lobbying strategies, the quality of their contacts to political stakeholders, and qualitative information about how lobbyists conceptualize corruption in the context of advocacy. This makes this study one of the few empirical contributions to the literature about the relationship of lobbying and corruption in democracies.