The Best-Kept Secret: Women Corporate Lobbyists, Policy, and Power in the United States

Chapter 1: Introduction

1 Chapter 1 Introduction Power is one of the most complex and difficult concepts in the social and political sciences, partly because there are so many competing definitions, and partly because many key decisions are made behind closed doors. At the same time, the analysis of power is critical to our understanding of how the world works.To examine the processes and structures of power in the United States and around the world is to develop a better understanding of the forces that shape our organizations , institutions, relationships, and, as a consequence, our own opportunities and experiences.Any hope for social change rests on our attention to power. Most scholarly and journalistic analyses of political-economic power in the United States focus on men at the top— corporate heads, politicians, hired guns—those who have the final say in making policy decisions or have direct authority or influence over those who do so or both. This book takes the analysis of power in the United States one step down and one step further by looking at a group that has received very little attention in the media and scholarly literature—the evergrowing cadre of in-house corporate-government relations officials who work largely behind the scenes lobbying for corporate interests in the political realm, and, in particular, women lobbyists, whose numbers over the last few decades have increased dramatically relative to men but fall even further below the radar screen. What is the significance of this new face of 2 Th e B e s t - K e p t S e c r e t corporate lobbying for creating and reproducing systems and structures of power? Does gender have anything to do with it? Who benefits and who loses as a result? Academics and the media have largely ignored these questions, and yet they are critical to our understanding of equality and democracy in the United States. Corporate Power In Who Rules America, G.William Domhoff (2002, 10–13) lists three indicators of who holds power in our society: 1)Who benefits? 2) Who governs? and 3) Who wins? With regard to who benefits, although those with the most income and wealth are not necessarily the most powerful,“income and the possession of great wealth are visible signs that a class has power in relation to other classes.” Power can also be inferred by looking at which group, or class, occupies important decision-making positions in a particular society. As Domhoff notes, the “who governs” indicator is not perfect because official positions of power may not in fact hold much power, and because groups or classes may exhibit and maintain power from behind the scenes. The third indicator, “who wins,” is the one employed most by social scientists and the one I use in this book. This indicator is most important in measuring power for the same reason it is problematic. Important decisions are made and policy set in ways that are hard to see because the process is by and large convoluted, confusing, takes place away from public view, and because non-decisions are often more advantageous to certain groups than decisions. However, when social scientists manage to untie the knots, put the puzzle pieces together, and when a few even manage to get behind the scenes, use of this indicator clearly and convincingly points us to corporations as holding enormous and unequal power in the United States. The corporate community “controls the public agenda and then wins on most issues that appear on it” (or prevents Introduction 3 them from appearing at all) through several different, but overlapping , processes (Domhoff 2002, 12): 1. The special-interest process 2. The policy-planning process 3. The candidate-selection process 4. The opinion-shaping process This book concentrates on the first process through which corporations , individually and as a whole, work to access and influence those who make public policy. Corporate lobbyists, lawyers, and various other corporategovernment relations officials are central to the special interest process through which corporations exert and maintain enormous influence in the political realm. Bartlett and Steele (1998, 2) define corporate welfare as “a game in which governments large and small subsidize corporations large and small, at the expense of another state and town and almost always at the expense of individual and other corporate taxpayers . . .The Federal Government [is] America’s biggest sugar daddy, dispensing a range of giveaways from tax abatements to...