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10. Lobbying Success
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176 Chapter 9 parties signing on to a letter; a member of Congress sees a letter and it’s signed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Sierra Club, how often do you see that?” The aim then is to build as big and as broad a coalition as possible. In this way advocates can signal to elected policymakers that a large majority of the electorate will likely support them, if they support this proposal. This electoral signaling in effect says to elected officials: vote for this without concern for negative political consequences. There is also evidence that pooling resources becomes part of the decision. While coalitions are in part about sending signals to policymakers, they are also about resource efficiency. A citizen organization active on the issue of disability rights in the welfare program described how CCD members tried to stretch their resources by divvying up meetings with members of Congress. A member of the basic education coalition painted a similar picture of trying to magnify the impact of coalition members. She explained how coalition members pooled resources to finance a trip for members of Congress to visit education projects in developing countries . Thus in the United States while we see strong evidence that coalition building is about sending a big and broad message to elected officials, stretching resources is also a goal. In the European Union the few actors reporting coalition activity focused more on resource sharing, rather than conveying the sheer breadth of support. As one member of the coalition on the CCD explained, the aim was to share information and work out the details of their position before they approached policymakers: “We set up last year the EBIC—the European Banking Industry Committee—and that has as members ourselves, the European Banking Federation, the European Savings Bank Group, and some others; it is a kind of platform, the aim is to find our convergences, and once we do the outcome is the drafting of letters to the Commission to the EP.” Similarly, a trade association active on the packaging environment indicator in the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive described how the coalition’s goal was to work out technical details: “We are really, I don’t want to say the authority, but the major player when it comes to packaging. Now each of the major sectors or materials also has its own organization; beverage has its own; plastic, paper, and each has its own subsection dealing with packaging and some resource devoted to that. We work in coalition with them. . . . So in those we exchange ideas, make sure we are all singing from the same hymn sheet.” Finally, a member of the coalition on solvent producers and users on the Clean Air for Europe issue emphasized that coalitions are more about hashing out the details and exchanging information than sending a political message . He noted that they met sixteen times a year to debate the current problems and decide on a common position. Networking and Coalitions 177 In further evidence of the resource pooling—and not political signaling— aim of coordinated activity in the European Union, advocates reported high levels of networking. Although they may not have needed to convey the magnitude of their support, and thus did not need to establish an ad hoc issue coalition, advocates active on the CAFE, REACH, data retention, and animal transport debates all engaged in highly organized networking. A trade association on the data retention issue explained: “We decided to work closely with the other E-associations, so EUROISPA, GSM Europe, ECTA—the smaller telecoms companies, we did a lot of lobbying, we wrote letters, we did a lot of information gathering and sharing.” The coordination of industry on the CAFE debate was nearly surgical in its precision, organized at the top by the pan-EU business association UNICE. Each of the lobbyists described divvying up tasks, sharing information, and working in synchronization. One trade association explained: I can’t possibly attend all the meetings, but we are always represented by UNICE, there is always one member of the working group at the meetings and then they share that and we circulate documents around. UNICE has a small working group set up on CAFE and it meets fairly often, once a month, and so we stay up to date that way. . . . And UNICE is sending a letter to all the commissioners, and we divide it up in the working group, so electricity has good contacts with DG Energy and...