Vital Statistics on Interest Groups and Lobbying by Brasher Holly;

Author:Brasher, Holly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1771348
Publisher: CQ Press
Published: 2014-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Lobbying by Foreign Commercial Interests

Two parts of the lobbying disclosure data can be used to study the lobbying behavior of foreign commercial interests. One field in the reports asks organizations to report the principal place of business for the country of the organization. This has the same significance as the principal place of business for the organization’s state for the U.S. state data. So as with organizations from the states, we can get a sense of the global distribution of the organizations that lobby the U.S. government using the country that is the client’s principal place of business.

Another field contains information on the contribution to the lobbying effort from an organization that is controlled by a foreign interest. It asks filers to report any foreign entity affiliated with the client that holds at least 20 percent ownership in the client and that directly or indirectly plans, supervises, controls, directs, finances, or subsidizes activities of the client or is an affiliate of the client with a direct interest in the outcome of the lobbying activity. One example of this would be Maersk, Inc., a shipping company that lists the Netherlands as the country of its principal place of business. Maersk, Inc., reports a contribution of $5,200 to HR Policy Association, which describes itself as “the lead public policy organization of chief human resource officers representing the largest employers doing business in the United States and globally.”14 These data show the degree of involvement of foreign commercial interests engaged in lobbying activity that might not be evident simply using the countries listed as the principal place of business. HR Policy Association reports Washington, D.C., as its address, but lists affiliated organizations from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Israel, among others, and lobbies on a wide range of labor and employment issues.

Figure 4-6 begins with the data based on the principal place of business country. It shows the global distribution of clients that list principal place of business as a country other than the United States. The first panel of the figure is 2000 and the second is 2010. The first thing to note is that the countries that lobby the United States are not the same in the two years. There are some countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan lobby in the United States every year. Organizations from other countries enter and then leave the lobbying community. In 2010, lobbying activity from South America is more prevalent in 2010 than in 2000.

Table 4-3 lists a comprehensive set of data for all countries lobbying from 1999 to 2012. In many cases organizations register to lobby and are counted in the table, but report no spending. This is true for the Bahamas and Bahrain in 2005. Organizations can choose to register as a precautionary measure to ensure that they commit no violations of the lobbying regulations. Others may register because they anticipate lobbying activity that does not follow once the organization has registered.

Changes in the global economy are evident in Table 4-3.

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