Power Of Lobby Research Articles

Centralized water management under lobbying: Economic analysis of desalination in Israel

This paper studies the impact of lobbying on policies in a centrally managed water economy. First, we develop an optimal control model in which long-run water-management policies are an outcome of negotiation between policymakers and a politically organized farming sector. We show that under equilibrium conditions in the political game, larger political power of the farmers' lobby leads to faster exhaustion of naturally replenished water resources, and expedites the investment in water-supply backstop technologies such as desalination. Then, we employ a detailed hydro-economic model of Israel's water economy to assess the validity of claims by scientists and bureaucrats that lobbying by the local agricultural sector has contributed to the depletion of the country's natural freshwater resources and thus accelerated the development of seawater desalination. Specifically, we compare observed trajectories of water-management policies in the years 2000–2020 to their simulated counterparts, and find a better fit for simulated scenarios that involve lobbying than for a socially optimal one; this result prevails under simulated conditions of extreme water shortage due to faster population growth or lower recharge of natural water sources. The best-fitted political-equilibrium scenarios indicate considerable deadweight loss. We discuss potential causes of over- and undervaluation of the lobbying effect.

Drought Victims Demand Justice: Politicization of Drought by Farmers in Southern Germany over Time

Farmers have an important role in problematizing and politicizing drought. Following the argumentative turn in policy analysis, the paper analyzes the process of problem definition by means of a framing analysis, zooming in on four major drought events covered in German farming sector journals that are published by farmers’ associations. The article compares the framing of the four most-cited drought events—1947, 1975–76, 2003, and 2011–12—in order to better understand how problematization has changed over time, and how farmers justify and rationalize calls for political action. Three research questions are answered: What problems are named by farmers journals when describing drought events, and what solutions are proposed? Who is considered responsible for problems and solutions? How has framing of drought changed over time? The paper shows that farmers frame drought as a matter of justice and assert their perceived right to subsidies, compensation, farmer-friendly tax policies, and market regulations by the state. From 2003, drought has been framed in association with climate change. The data findings suggest that there is no post-productivist, post-exceptionalist paradigm shift connected to proposed drought policy solutions. Drought framings appear to be persistent, giving priority to assured farmers’ incomes, not water distribution. Considering the lobby power of farmers’ associations in Germany, this finding helps to understand why state interventions remain the same over time.

Discussion

Discussion

Reopening the Trade after SARS: China’s Wildlife Industry and the Fateful Policy Reversal

China’s policy-making remains a top-down process. Yet, non-State actors, particularly businesses that have aligned their commercial interest with the national interest and political objectives of the Party-State, are uniquely positioned to impact policy-making. This article uses China’s reopening of the wildlife trade following the end of SARS in 2003 to shed light on the interplay of the Party’s policy guidelines, the policy-making authority of the administrative agencies, and the influence of the country’s wildlife business interest. This article argues that the reversal of the wildlife trade ban was predestined since expanding wildlife business also contributed to the government’s development objectives and served the bureaucratic interest of the administrative authorities. In 2003, the wildlife businesses had unique lobbying power. It was a production of scale that purportedly served the country’s conservation, public health and poverty-reduction purposes. The failure of the Chinese scientists to reach a consensus on the risk of pandemic outbreaks from wildlife operations helped the Chinese authorities to end the wildlife trade, a fateful decision. The outbreak of COVID-19 has led to an enhanced understanding of the connections between wildlife exploitation and pandemic outbreaks. China has come to a crossroads to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of its wildlife industry.

The Tech Lobby: Tracing the Contours of New Media Elite Lobbying Power

The Tech Lobby: Tracing the Contours of New Media Elite Lobbying Power

Productivity growth and welfare in a model of allocative inefficiency

We develop a model of learning-by-doing in human capital formation in the presence of allocative inefficiencies. The inefficiencies are a result of lobbying by firms to establish, or prevent, barriers to the perfectly competitive allocation of factors of production (labor). It is shown that lobbying may lead to a static welfare loss depending upon the elasticity of substitution between goods, and the relative lobbying power of firms. Further, productivity growth, via learning by doing, changes the relative lobbying power over time. This may magnify or diminish the static welfare loss in the long-run depending on the level of initial misallocation. Therefore, differences in initial lobbying power and rate of productivity growth between sectors determine the long-run effects of lobbying.

Learning-by-Doing in a Model of Allocative Inefficiency

We develop a model of learning by doing in human capital formation in the presence of allocative inefficiencies. The inefficiencies are a result of lobbying by firms to establish, or prevent, barriers to the perfectly competitive allocation of factors of production (labor). It is shown that lobbying may lead to a static welfare loss depending upon the relative lobbying power of firms seeking to establish barriers to the competitive allocation of labor. We further show that productivity growth via learning by doing may make firms more effective at lobbying by increasing their lobbying power, leading to greater misallocation over time. This magnifies the static welfare loss over time depending on the elasticity of substitution between goods produced in the economy.

Including severe accidents in the design basis of nuclear power plants: An organizational factors perspective after the Fukushima accident

The Fukushima accident was clearly an accident made by humans and not caused by natural phenomena as was initially thought. Vulnerabilities were known by both regulators and operator but they postponed measures. The emergency plan was not effective in protecting the public, because the involved parties were not sufficiently prepared to make the right decisions. The shortcomings and faults mentioned above resulted from the lack of independence and transparency of the regulatory body. Even laws and regulations, and technical standards, have not been upgraded to international standards. Regulators have not defined requirements and left for the operator to decide what would be more appropriate. In this aspect, there was clearly a lack of independence between these bodies and operator’s lobby power. The above situation raised the question of urgent updating of institutions, in particular those responsible for nuclear safety. The above evidences show that several nuclear safety principles were not followed. This paper intends to highlight some existing safety criteria that were developed from the operational experience of the severe accidents that occurred at TMI and Chernobyl that should be incorporated in the design of new nuclear power plants and to provide appropriate design changes (backfittings) for reactors that belong to the previous generation prior to the occurrence of these accidents, through the study of design vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the main criteria that define an effective regulatory agency are also discussed. Although these criteria appear in IAEA guides and requirements, this paper proposes that some of these requirements should be more detailed in line with what has been learned as the most important lessons of Fukushima in order to prevent organizational failures.

Social Security Policy and the Early Disability Movement--Expertise, Disability, and the Government, 1965-77.

In 1965, the Disablement Income Group launched its National Disability Income campaign to fight for equal treatment of disabled people in the British social security system. By 1977, a series of benefits were created to cover the general population. Yet, despite the obvious political significance of these developments, very little research has focused on the early pan-impairment disability non-governmental organization (NGO). Existing scholarship has come from one of two traditions: the 'poverty lobby' and NGO histories that focus on expert campaign groups; and disability studies which describes a teleological narrative of the development of disabled people's attempts to secure civil rights. This article contends that neither approach is satisfactory. The crossovers between these two historical approaches are necessary to understand how these groups operated and to appreciate their political significance. Using the archives of the Disablement Income Group, the Disability Alliance and the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation, this article shows that the history of these NGOs is more nuanced than previously described. Similarly, the novelty and growing power of civil rights and poverty lobby campaigning should not be overstated. Through a specific analysis of the lobby in its social and political context, historians can find a clearer picture of how these groups operated and better analyse their significance.

Researching Illegal Logging and Deforestation

Tropical deforestation such as in the Amazon can be studied well from a green criminological perspective. Ethnographic research methods form a useful way to get insight into the dynamics and complexity of tropical deforestation, which often is illegal. This article gives an account of various ethnographic visits to the rainforests of the Amazon in the period 2003-2014. Ethnographic methods provide insight into the overlap between the legal and illegal, the functioning (or not) of state institutions, the power of (corporate) lobbies, and why tropical deforestation correlates with crimes such as corruption and violence. The use of ethnographic methods in forest areas where trustworthy state actors and institutions are not very present can also present danger and raise ethical issues (such as when the researcher, for reasons of safety, does not present as a criminological researcher). However, a large advantage of ethnographic visits to tropical rainforests is that they allow the gathering of local views and voices, which rarely reach the international level. These local views lead to interesting contradictions at the international level where corporate views and lobbies dominate.

Climate Change, Heterogeneities, and Stability of International Fiscal Harmonization

This paper analyzes the instability introduced into multilateral agreements by two types of heterogeneity: heterogeneity of countries (size and number of producing members) and heterogeneity of lobbies (asymmetric influence at the national versus the international level). The work extends theoretical prospective analyses on environmental taxation, as illustrated by the harmonization of fuel taxes. We show that the acceptability of the tax set at the multilateral level depends on the type of coalitions that participate in the multilateral negotiation (size and number of producing countries) and the asymmetry in the local (state-level) power of lobbies during negotiations.

The politics of climate change in Germany: ambition versus lobby power

In 30 years of climate policy in Germany, a high level of declared ambition has coexisted with an eclectic mix of climate policy measures. Well‐organized lobbies were either exempt from policy instruments such as the energy tax or directly benefitted from them, as in the case of the renewable feed‐in tariff or windfall profits from free allocation of emissions allowances. As a result, German emissions mitigation is much more costly than it would have to be. Moreover, the challenges because of the imminent phase‐out of nuclear power are increasing due to failures in a number of relevant policy fields such as offshore wind, grid reinforcement, and carbon capture and storage (CCS). WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:315–320. doi: 10.1002/wcc.224This article is categorized under: The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Policies, Instruments, Lifestyles, Behavior Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy

Scarlet v SABAM: Evidence of an Emerging Backlash Against Corporate Copyrights Lobbies in Europe?

The very recent decision of the European Court of Justice in Scarlet v SABAM is of high importance, especially for the ongoing debate around copyright enforcement online: the judges of the court decided that wide-ranging measures which involved total monitoring of Internet users' activity and the blocking of peer-to-peer sites via which copyrighted material may be accessed illegally for an unlimited time was a disproportionate measure, and emphasised the fact that intellectual property rights were not absolute rights, but had to be balanced against other rights such as free expression and privacy. This chapter will present an in-depth analysis of Scarlet v SABAM, and the background against which it was decided, in order to assess whether it represents another instance of a fightback against copyright lobbies in Europe. Europe over the last few years has followed the United States in enacting measures to extend copyright terms, and at the national level legislation has also been enacted specifically to target Internet users allegedly infringing copyright protections by downloading illicitly copyrighted material, especially from peer-to-peer filesharing programmes, such as the Digital Economy Act in the United Kingdom, in the midst of heavy lobbying from corporate copyright holders for ever stricter measures. Nevertheless, the Scarlet v SABAM case has been decided at a time when the tide may be turning against the power of copyright lobbies in Europe. Firstly, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes, recently critiqued the current approach to copyright enforcement in Europe as not protecting the interests of the majority of individual artists, as well as being alienating the general citizenry. Furthermore, in the United Kingdom the government has been conducting a wide-ranging review of communications regulation, which has involved discussions over the reform of intellectual property, particularly in the digital age, including a recommendation that an evidence-based approach be adopted to making policy in this area, which balances economic and social objectives (containing an implicit scepticism about the corporate lobbying that has hitherto being a major driver of intellectual property policy).However, Scarlet v SABAM may also encompass the ascendancy in the copyright debate of another powerful lobby with its own interests, namely that of the telecommunications companies such as Scarlet which provide Internet access to users, and for which monitoring users' data to detect copyright violations represents a cost to them lacking a (profit-based) benefit. Although in the past telecoms companies have claimed that they are unable to monitor content, this is not accurate at present, given the availability of deep packet inspection technologies, which are indeed used by these very companies but in a way which provides new means of exploitation and sources of profit by prioritising and/or blocking certain types of Internet traffic.The chapter would consider these issues through the adoption of an actor-based approach, in order to analyse the case in light of the competing discourses presented by the creative and telecommunications industries, in addition to the view of consumer advocate groups. In doing so, the Scarlet case will be assessed in the context of the ongoing debate regarding the limits of copyright, and will also refer to recent developments such as the Copyright in Sound Recordings Term Extension Directive, and proposals for a Directive on Criminal Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights.

Ethics of Resource Allocation and Rationing Medical Care in a Time of Fiscal Restraint - US and Europe

Background: All resources are scarce. The ethical dilemma in health care is how to balance the precepts of autonomy, beneficence, and distributive justice. Rationing may affect three dimensions of coverage: the share of the population covered, the services covered, and the extent to which services are covered. United States: The US spends 50 percent more per capita on health care than any other country while achieving worse health than many. Poorly coordinated insurance mechanisms leave 19 percent of the population uninsured. Until passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010, health care was effectively a privilege, not a right. While PPACA seeks to rectify this, by 2019 five percent of non-elderly US residents will likely remain uninsured. Europe: Most European countries provide universal or near-universal population coverage to people resident in the respective country. Central and Eastern European countries inherited the Soviet-era commitment to universal coverage free at the point of use. Faced with a decline in government spending on health, almost all of them reduced the scope of services and introduced official user fees. In contrast, other European countries expanded entitlement to publicly funded health care, resulting in greater equity. A number of countries have attempted to depoliticize decisions on rationing by using health technology assessments and dedicated agencies. Discussion: Resource allocation and rationing differ considerably between the US and Europe. In the US, where social welfare remains controversial, there are few restrictions on the use of health care technology regardless of cost or clinical effectiveness. European countries engage in more explicit debates about these limits, though these are complicated by media and lobby power. Conclusion: The ethical issues in the US largely revolve around rationing care by eligibility for insurance coverage, whereas in Europe they are more concerned with the scope of publicly funded services to all. On both sides of the Atlantic, public debates are needed about the financial sustainability of health systems, the tradeoffs between cost-containment and broader societal and health system goals, the role of the welfare state, and the limits of publicly financed health care.

Understanding the Middle East Peace Process: A historical institutionalist approach

This article challenges the common assumption that the external actors involved in the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) are driven either by neo-realist strategic competition or by the constraining power of domestic lobbies, or by a mixture of both. Such implicit assumptions are evident in the controversial argument of the power of the ‘Israel lobby’ as promoted by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. This article argues that approaches based on such assumptions fail to explain adequately the policies adopted not only by the United States, but also by other key external actors who have been historically engaged in the MEPP — the Soviet Union and the European Union. A better explanatory framework is provided by treating the MEPP as an institution and by applying a historical institutionalist approach to the development of the MEPP, using such concepts as critical junctures, path dependence and positive feedback to analyse how the main external actors involved in the MEPP came to adopt their distinctive national approaches to the peace process. In particular, it is the responses of these actors to certain critical junctures, most notably but not exclusively to the period of the 1967 and 1973 Arab–Israeli wars, that has had a particularly strong influence on policy formulation. For the US case, the creative policymaking of Henry Kissinger during the period after the 1973 war, which was subsequently incorporated into the US conceptualization of the MEPP, provides powerful and generally unrecognized insights into the initial puzzle identified by Walt and Mearsheimer — the consistent and almost unconditional support given to Israel by the United States despite the strategic problems this creates for broader US Middle East policy.

ELECTORAL CYCLES THROUGH LOBBYING

In this paper, we build a framework where the interplay between the lobby power of special interest groups and the voting power of the majority of the population leads to political business cycles. We apply our setup to explain electoral cycles in government expenditure composition, aggregate expenditures, and real exchange rates.

Barriers to senior citizens' outdoor mobility in Europe.

The aim of this study was to picture perceived problems amongst older citizens in the traffic environment. Moreover, answers to the question why measures that are known to be efficient concerning the mobility of senior citizens are often not implemented. Eight EU countries participated in the study, involving both senior citizens and experts (researchers, decision makers and practitioners who deal with all aspects of seniors' mobility). Focus group interviews and personal interviews involving 487 senior citizens and 225 experts were carried out in order to chart problems. These were followed by quantitative surveys with 3,309 senior citizens and 490 experts that had the scope to measure the distribution of charted problems in the population. Finally, five workshops were carried out in order to discuss results and to formulate assumptions why promising measures are not implemented, as it appears. Barriers to mobility are by both experts and senior citizens attributed to traffic and infrastructure characteristics, to legal issues, to vehicle design problems, to inter-personal and inter-generational frictions, to lacking lobby power, but also to individual health problems. In order to improve mobility it is suggested by both senior citizens and experts to enforce vehicle speeds. Both groups also agree that public transport vehicles should be brought into an appropriate standard (low floor vehicles, kneeling busses). Senior citizens more than the experts ask for measures to support the sense of security and safety in the public space (police should be visible, appropriate design of infrastructure, public lighting).

Dual-Mandate of Persons Who Serve as MPs and Mayors at the Same Time

The incompatibility of the function at the state and local levels is defined to prevent exercising a dual mandate and other forms of conflict of interest to secure self-government in local communities. The discussed positions of dual- or even triple-mandate officials are neither unconstitutional nor unlawful in themselves, yet they relate to the incompatibility of interest roles these dual-mandate or triple-mandate officials simultaneously play. The inability of the National Assembly to regulate the issue of the incompatibility of the function in accordance with the basic principles in the state (balance of powers, local self-government autonomy, representative democracy) leads us to the conviction that, for the time being, the parliamentary lobby power is too great, whereas the political culture of the public is too weak to prevent the further steps of the legislator. An important aspect of the incompatibility of the function lies in the fact that individuals should be aware that performing the multiple functions, obtained in elections, is not a privilege, but it is a commitment and duty to perform the functions well and with dedication. The paradox is that an individual who is aware of this does not need any rules on the incompatibility of the function at all.
 
 KEY WORDS: • incompatibility of the function • mandate • National Assembly Members • mayor • deputy mayor • local self-government • separation of powers • Slovenia

Division Manager Lobbying Power and the Allocation of Capital

AbstractWe investigate whether division manager lobbying power affects the allocation of capital in multi‐divisional firms. We find that firm‐level disparities in division manager lobbying power (measured by tenure, time‐in‐position, board membership, and top executive status) affect capital allocation in expected ways. Managers with greater relative lobbying power compete for capital expenditures from a position of strength. Evidence is also provided which suggests that division manager ownership mitigates lobbying efforts. Furthermore, disparity in division manager lobbying power is associated with lower firm excess value. These results support the view that division manager influence activities impact the operation of internal capital markets.

Looking Back at the Future: Why Hillarycare Failed

The current Democratic Party candidates for U.S. president, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, have committed themselves to establishing universal health care that will guarantee access to care in time of need, a basic human right still denied in the United States. This commitment is partly a response to the U.S. population's high levels of dissatisfaction (now at unprecedented levels) with the way health care is funded and organized. The article analyzes why a similar commitment by President Bill Clinton in 1992 failed, and challenges some of the main explanations for that failure put forward by protagonists of the White House health care reform task force (chaired by Hillary Clinton). The author emphasizes that the primary reason for the failure was the lack of political will to confront major players in medical care funding, especially the insurance companies and large employers. He postulates that unless such political will exists and unless the system of funding electoral campaigns undergoes major reform-reducing or eliminating the power of financial and economic lobbies in the political process-the United States will not have universal health care. It is a worrisome sign that these lobbies are financing the campaigns of many of today's presidential candidates.