Revolving Door Lobbying

"An excellent contribution to understanding lobbying in contemporary American politics."—Choice

“LaPira and Thomas deftly bring much-needed nuance and depth to our understanding of lobbying. They persuasively explain how Congress’s own decisions to cut internal capacity and centralize power in leadership fueled the expansion of the revolving door, and they demonstrate why most lobbying is designed to prevent Congress from taking action. Revolving Door Lobbying is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the real reasons why Washington stopped working, and why those with resources to hire the best lobbyists keep winning, even without having to bribe anybody.”—Lee Drutman, author of The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate

“In this, the most comprehensive single assessment of Washington’s “revolving door” system by which underpaid government staffers move to the private sector to influence their former colleagues, Thomas and LaPira debunk a number of myths. Most importantly, they document the different worlds of “substantive” and “procedural” lobbyists, and the different values that each bring to their clients, and to the government. They push us to recenter our debates about the values and deficiencies of our lobbying system toward the system itself, not the individuals involved in it. The vast bulk of the problems associated with how we lobby in Washington are associated with what interests are over- and under-represented there, not in what individual lobbyists do or try to do. As they write, no single lobbyist, like no single government official, can make Washington turn on a dime; the system is too decentralized for that. But collectively, the massive biases and inequities that determine who is “at the table” versus who is “on the menu” in Washington make this book a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the system really works, based on data, not anecdotes.”—Frank R. Baumgartner, author of Lobbying and Policy Change and co-director of the Policy Agendas Project