Thomas T. Holyoke - The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry
Here you can read online Thomas T. Holyoke - The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Washington, D.C., year: 2015, publisher: Georgetown University Press, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry
- Author:
- Publisher:Georgetown University Press
- Genre:
- Year:2015
- City:Washington, D.C.
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Lobbyists in Washington arent a new phenomenon. Since the early days of the republic, citizens and groups alike have hired professionals to press their interests with lawmakers. However, recent examples of misconduct like that seen in the Abramoff scandal highlight the unique ethical challenges this industry faces in the twenty-first century.Though major scandals happen less frequently than popularly believed, the more pervasive ethics problem is that members of the profession often cut deals that go against their clients interests. They sacrifice the interests of those they represent in order to curry favor with lawmakers. In The Ethical Lobbyist, Thomas T. Holyoke exposes how current industry regulations fall short of ensuring principled behaviors and may actually incentivize unethical behavior.Holyoke presents the provocative argument that, in addition to welcoming stronger regulations, lobbyists need to borrow a page from the legal profession and adopt ironclad guarantees of principled representation.The Ethical Lobbyist puts forth a set of principles and a workable program for implementing reform. The result is a road map to reform that will transform ethical lobbyist from an oxymoron to an expectation and change the industry and our government for the better.
Thomas T. Holyoke: author's other books
Who wrote The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Thomas T. Holyoke
Lydia Dotto
Sue Thomas
Holyoke
John M. Darley
Simon Robinson
The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
The Ethical Lobbyist
Related Georgetown Digital Shorts
Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector
by Daren C. Brabham
by Daren C. Brabham
Talking Politics? What You Need to Know before Opening Your Mouth
by Sheila Suess Kennedy
by Sheila Suess Kennedy
Other Related Works
Competitive Interests: Competition and Compromise in American Interest Group Politics
by Thomas T. Holyoke
by Thomas T. Holyoke
The Ethical Lobbyist
Reforming Washingtons Influence Industry
Thomas T. Holyoke
2015 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases and special offers from Georgetown University Press.
Contents
Acknowledgments
THIS PROJECT STARTED as a whim one day when I was thinking about some of the implications of the arguments I made about how lobbying works in my books Competitive Interests: Competition and Compromise in American Interest Group Politics and Interest Groups and Lobbying: Pursuing Politics Interests in America. Rather than do just another value-free study of interest group lobbying, I decided to write something that connected my work to the real world of lobbying and, hopefully, has some real relevance to that world and the people who work in it. Because normative work like this often cannot find a home in academic journals, I am very grateful to the staff members of Georgetown University Press for their willingness to take a chance on the project through their Digital Shorts series. I would like to thank the Office of the Provost and the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno, for sponsoring parts of the research leading to this work. I would also like to thank my former department chair, David Schecter, for giving me the Rolling Stone article that got the whole manuscript going!
Introduction
IN 2013 ROLLING STONE magazine published an expos of one of Americas most powerful interest groups, the National Rifle Association (NRA). A gruesome school shooting claiming the lives of students and teachers had failed to shake the NRAs opposition to legislation proposed by President Barack Obama restricting a persons ability to purchase any type of gun, or even track gun ownership. But because restrictions on firearm purchases and background checks threatened the gun manufacturers dominating the NRAs board of directors, the author argued that Wayne LaPierre, the organizations executive vice president, had little choice but to take a hard-line position. The presidents gun control legislation sank in the Senate as a result. The author questioned LaPierres ethics for choosing to oppose legislation supported by a majority of his own members, as well as a majority of Americans. But was his choice unethical?
This is an important question to think about. Interest groups and lobbying firms are, after all, Washingtons growth industry. By one, arguably conservative, count, there are almost 7,000 organized interest groups and more than 19,000 lobbyists working in and around the capital city today.
Although large, world-spanning behemoth corporations invest more money and effort on lobbying than anybody else, political advocacy by corporate interests and cause-oriented public interest groups exists across the board. What could be more unethical than that?
But what does it even mean to talk about ethical lobbying? What purpose would ethics serve? Is there an ethical standard? Would lobbyists themselves know when they are acting ethically? For all the concern expressed about corrupt lobbyists, there have been very few attempts to define what good or desirable, and thus presumably ethical, lobbying might be like. The political theorist Jane Mansbridge once argued that lobbying can be legitimate in a pluralist system because so many interests, both big and small, need representation, but legitimacy requires lobbyists to first get the people they represent to talk with each other and figure out just what their interests really are. Once constituent interests are defined and refined through deliberation, she argued, lobbyists can go about the business of pressuring political leaders to meet the demands of these interests. Whether dialogue among constituents makes lobbying ethical is not clear; nor is it clear that lobbyists can be compelled to engage constituents in it.
I argue that Mansbridge is essentially right; but defining lobbying ethics means that we must figure out what makes lobbying legitimate in the first place, and also what drives some lobbyists to act illegitimately. It is the Constitutions First Amendment that gives lobbying a role in the representative democracy of the United States. It protects lobbying as a legitimate form of political representation, but only as long as lobbyists faithfully represent the wants and concerns of the people employing them. Ethics protect a professions legitimacy, and in this case the ethical problem is that lobbyists might misrepresent the interests of the people employing them because the power relationship between them is so unequal. Because lobbyists know more about what is happening in the political system, and their own role in it, than the people they represent, lobbyists have the power to manipulate the interests of their constituents. Ethical lobbyists must put aside any personal or professional pressures that might tempt them to take advantage of this information asymmetry. They must honestly, even myopically, represent only the interests of the peoplewhether clients or interest group memberswho employ them, once these interests have been determined and refined.
Can any legal framework guarantee that lobbyists will behave ethically? Of course not. Nobody can be forced to be ethical when they are determined to behave badly. But in many professions, as with lawyers and medical doctors, laws reinforce the ethical standards set by the profession itself by requiring the disclosure of certain kinds of information. Can ethical standards be defined for the lobbying profession that are reinforced by the mandatory disclosure of information? I believe so, as long as they are based on three crucial principles of representation: transparency, accountability, and consensus. Current lobbying disclosure laws, unfortunately, fail to do this. New laws are needed, and needed quickly, because it takes time for disclosed information to become regularly relied on by a professions practitioners and enforcers, just as it takes time for ethical norms to take root. Otherwise, the growing ferocity of competition to influence policy, and the temptation to make enormous amounts of money while doing it, at the expense of constituent interests will overwhelm any effort to build a system of professional ethics.
To reinforce this sense of urgency, I start, in I sketch a framework for lobbying ethics, and a proposal for reforming the lobbying disclosure laws based on this framework.
Growth Industry
SHEER NUMBERS SHOW just how large a presence interest groups and lobbyists have in modern American politics. According to Lobbyists.info, there are nearly 18,000 organized interest groups lobbying state and national governments in the United States today, with nearly 7,000 primarily lobbying just the national government.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry»
Look at similar books to The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Lydia Dotto
Sue Thomas
Holyoke
John M. Darley
Simon Robinson
Reviews about «The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry»
Discussion, reviews of the book The Ethical Lobbyist: Reforming Washington’s Influence Industry and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.