Here are a few more interesting items concerning how lobbyist disclosure is done elsewhere.
San Francisco seems to be leading the way in detailed disclosure, as summarized by the Sunshine Foundation.
Lobbyists who are paid over $3,000 for lobbying activities during a three month period must register with the city within five business days. Once registered, they are required to file monthly activity reports. These reports contain the details of each lobbyist’s contacts with public officials, including listing meetings, emails, phone calls, and personal political contributions. The reports also include the amount of the lobbyist’s compensation and any expenditures such as transportation, hotels, and meals. By contrast, the activity reports mandated by many states only require the disclosure of lobbying expenditures.
Click here to visit the Lobbyist page on the San Francisco Ethics Commission, which includes directories of individual lobbyists, lobbyist clients, lobbying firms, contacts with public officials, and other information.
The City of Los Angeles Ethics Commission also has a very robust online system, where you can view lobbyist information and regular reports on things like “lobbyist-related fundraising activity and solicitations,” “lobbyist-related political contributions,” and much more.
Another useful resource is the Advisory Committee on Transparency, funded by the Sunshine Foundation, which has a series of reports on issues relating to lobbyist disclosure.
Here’s one, for example: “Is it Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process.”
Here’s the abstract:
What do lobbyists do? Some believe that lobbyists’ main role is to provide issue-specific information and expertise to congressmen to help guide the law-making process. Others believe that lobbyists mainly provide the firms and other special interests they represent with access to politicians in their “circle of influence” and that this access is the be-all and end-all of how lobbyists affect the lawmaking process. This paper combines a descriptive analysis with more targeted testing to get inside the black box of the lobbying process and inform our understanding of the relative importance of these two views of lobbying. We exploit multiple sources of data covering the period 1999 to 2008, including: federal lobbying registration from the Senate Office of Public Records, Federal Election Commission reports, committee and subcommittee assignments for the 106th to 110th Congresses, and background information on individual lobbyists.
A pure issue expertise view of lobbying does not fit the data well. Instead, maintaining connections to politicians appears central to what lobbyists do. In particular, we find that whom lobbyists are connected to (through political campaign donations) directly affects what they work on. More importantly, lobbyists appear to systematically switch issues as the politicians they were previously connected to switch committee assignments, hence following people they know rather than sticking to issues. We also find evidence that lobbyists that have issue expertise earn a premium, but we uncover that such a premium for lobbyists that have connections to many politicians and Members of Congress is considerably larger.
The Open Secrets Blog looked at a GAO report done last year assessing compliance with federal lobbyist disclosure requirements. A 2011 update is also available.
In any case, browsing through this information should provide very useful perspective.
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Ian, I read with interest the material about San Francisco’s Commission that enforces SF lobbying laws. It interested me because the first director called me and visited me before the agency started for my views on problems to watch out for, and I am sure she contacted many other agencies regarding lobbying, if not all of them. This was typical at the time–new agencies (created decades after the HSEC) had the benefit of asking other directors in the country about their laws and problems they ran into, and to read a good model law on ethics produced by the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws. Thus, new agencies (after doing due diligence) were often able to start with strong laws–Los Angeles, Texas, Alaska, etc.
In any event, a quick Google search does not lead me to believe that San Francisco’s agency is doing all that well in the lobbying area to be held up as perhaps an ideal model. The agency has been criticized by the media in SF for not enforcing its lobbying law, and there are complaints that the term “lobbyist” is unclear–which I found to be true. This does not surprise me.
Some comparisons between SF and our State’s lobbying law are interesting. Our law requires spending only $750 in a lobbying period as one of the thresholds for lobbying, while in SF you have to be paid $3,000 in a three-month period for “lobbying” (whatever that means–not clear to me in their manual). Secondly, the list of those you lobby that triggers lobbying in SF is limited to a select number of high-ranking officials, with something on the order of just an explanatory note about perhaps lobbying an official’s staff that might be counted. In Hawaii, lobbying includes direct and indirect lobbying–which thus includes in Hawaii “grassroots” lobbying–one of about the first 3 states to require this, if not the first. That means lobbying includes asking your neighbor or business person to contact a legislator, etc., to influence legislation, assuming one is paid to do so and meets the threshold requirements to be a lobbyist. The SF law may require more clearer reporting, but that is not much help if the monetary thresholds are set so high or definitions are vague enough to allow people not to register at all, which is what it seems SF newspaper articles and editorials assert. It is not easy to rate or rank the effectiveness of lobbying laws or agencies that enforce them, in my view. For starters, one has to know this area of law fairly well to even comment with some level of knowledge. The ABA’s manual on the federal lobbying law is over 500 pages long–and it’s just a manual. Similarly, The U.S. House Ethics Manual on gifts devotes 95 pages to gifts alone. We all want the best laws and the best enforcement and disclosure. Writing ethics and lobbying laws is not easy, nor is the enforcement of these laws, without the powers that law enforcement agencies have. So combine the difficulty with writing the laws with the usual abysmal lack of resources an agency is given, and the lack of effective enforcement tools (and those with personal knowledge unwilling to come forward) and you have the current state of affairs, despite the good intentions of many.