An Environmental Lobbyist Exerts Pressure

From The American President (1995)

Categories:

Run time: 1:51

Clip Description: An environmental lobbying agency hires an expert political strategist to exert pressure on the presidential administration to put a bill asking for a 20% cut in emissions in the 1995 movie, The American President.

American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful in discussions about single-interest issues as well as the power of political lobbying.

Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip can teach about political lobbying and addressing issues that are single-interests.

Discussion Questions

The lobbyist here is hired from outside, paid, and professional. The standard defense of that arrangement is constitutional and practical at once: petitioning the government is a protected right, and legislators cannot generate on their own the technical information that a bill on emissions requires. The standard indictment is that it converts money into policy. Both are partly true of almost every lobbying campaign. What test would let you sort one from the other in a specific case, without simply asking whether you liked the bill?
Mancur Olson’s point in The Logic of Collective Action is that a diffuse benefit is much harder to organize around than a concentrated cost: everyone gets cleaner air whether or not they help pay for the lobbying, while the industry facing the compliance bill knows exactly what it stands to lose. Environmental groups exist anyway, in strength, which makes them the interesting case. What lets a diffuse-interest group get built — and once it is built on donations and mailing lists, whose preferences does its staff in Washington actually answer to?
You have probably signed a petition, joined a mailing list, or given a small amount to an advocacy organization. Did you ever check what it went on to ask for in your name, or which bills it worked on? If not, you were doing roughly what the audience for a lobbying campaign is meant to do. Decide whether that bothers you, and whether it should.

Assignment

Federal lobbying is disclosed. Registered lobbyists file quarterly reports with the House and Senate; the databases are searchable and OpenSecrets aggregates them. Pick one organization working on an issue you care about, pull a single quarter’s filing, and report what it shows: who was retained, how much was reported, which specific bills by number, and which chambers and agencies were contacted. Two pages. The hard part is the gap the document leaves — it records that they were paid to work on a bill and never records a word of what they said. Write about what a disclosure regime can and cannot catch, and what you would need to know before calling a given case corruption rather than advocacy.

For AP Students

AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 4: Party and Electoral Systems and Citizen Organizations

Topics: 4.5 Impact of Social Movements and Interest Groups; 4.6 Pluralist and Corporatist Interests
Skill: Country Comparison
Big idea: Internal and External Forces
Course countries: United Kingdom, Mexico, China

An environmental group hires a professional strategist to push an emissions bill on the White House. The course distinguishes pluralist systems, in which groups compete for access on their own account, from corporatist ones, in which the state licenses a limited set of official partners. The United States is the pluralist textbook case, and this is what pluralism looks like when it is working.

Discussion questions

Define pluralist and corporatist interest representation. Which one does the clip show, and what detail in it tells you?
The group hires an expert rather than mobilizing its members. Name one advantage of that route and one thing a movement gives up by taking it.
In China, organizations resembling interest groups operate with state approval and can lose it. Explain what that does to the kind of demands such a group is willing to make.

Short activity

The access map (15 minutes). Students draw how an environmental group would reach the decision-maker in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Who does it talk to, and what does it need before it is allowed to talk to them? Three short chains, drawn side by side. The differences in the length of the chain and in who controls entry to it are the comparison, and students can see them without being told what conclusion to reach.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.