Fixing the Broken System of Lobbying Lobbyists are a critical piece of the way that our government functions.

Their main job is to influence decisions of the government officials or members of regulatory agencies. Professional lobbyists are hired to influence legislation in favor of a particular interest group or cooperation. A criticism of the field of lobbying is that companies and organizations use their high socioeconomic status to influence legislation to benefit them. Along with these claims there is also unmistakable accounts of lobbyists making sure that minorities interests are equally represented when it comes down to making legislative changes. There are many pros and cons to lobbying that have been brought to attention in an article from the American Political Science Review. Lobbying by definition of this article is, To promote or oppose any legislation affecting the pecuniary interests of any individual, association or corporation, (Kenyon, 1907). This definition deduces that lobbying can include a vast amount of tasks. A common occurrence, and the one that is generally thought of first when thinking of lobbying is, hiring someone to speak and lobby on their behalf for large ranges of decisions. The majority of the time lobbying is used for legislative and policy issues. Companies or associations that hire and use lobbyists have to strictly abide by the governments laws or they will be heavily fined up to 1000 dollars or more by the state (Kenyon, 1907). There are also different variations of the laws that go along with legal lobbying from state to state (Kenyan, 1907). This is another crucial issue that lobbying is facing today due to the way that the general public many not be completely informed on what laws their own state participates in. There needs to be transparency in the view of lobbying so that there are no discrepancies of laws (Sachs, 2010). A way to do this

would be to make national laws that requires all lobbying to be government sanctioned and have a singular set of laws and rules that the government has agreed on for lobbyists to follow. There is a pressing issue that lobbying needs to be more of a public matter than it ahs been in the past (Sachs, 2010). Ideally if the general public was able to see what was going on in the so-called backroom decision making there would be a hugely lowered amount of speculation on the legitimacy legislation that was passed with the help of lobbyists (Sachs, 2010). The problem of the public not being able to fully understand and see the process of decision making that is directly effecting their daily lives is where the whole problem of the policy system of lobbying lies (Kenyan, 1907). Having the public become more included in these actions and decisions could virtually cut out the issues of the general public seeing some lobbying as a negative (Sachs, 2010). Along with this since womens rights began there has been a push for women to be more involved in the government. There is still some speculation if women can perform the same way as men in such a job as lobbying (Lucas , 2012). There was a study conducted to determine if there was a difference between the performance between men and women in the field of lobbying (Lucas & Hyde, 2012). Their study unanimously proved that there is no real difference in performance between genders (Lucas, 2012). If there is common knowledge of this study then there would not be any controversy of thinking that men or women perform differently as lobbyists (Lucas, 2012). The vast majority of issues that are proposed about lobbyists is due to not having enough of what they do up front for everyone to see and this is something that is easily fixable (Sachs, 2010). While there many be problems I have faith in the system and

believe that there are enough people who wish to have this field stay in tact and keep a good name by keeping it honest and open. All of my research on the field of lobbying has led me to many conclusions and findings about the field. There were positives and negatives that were found in the three articles discussed above. Once I go through all of the schooling if the issues of some lobbying being considered backroom affairs I wish to eventually get a policy where there has to be transparency with the public. I also think that it is necessary to have countrywide laws that have to do with specifics of lobbying and the punishments of breaking these laws to discard confusion.

References Kenyon, E. (1907). Lobbying. The American Political Science Review, 1, 618-620. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1945002?seq=2 Lucas, J. (2012). Men and women lobbyists in the American states. Social Science Quarterly, 93(2), 394-414. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2012.00841.X. Sachs, J. (2012). Fixing the broken policy process. Scientific America, 302, 28-28. Retrieved from http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=c172f3d5-ed66-4974-9dbad1407eaad3aa%40sessionmgr4002&vid=1&hid=4214&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc 3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=mth&AN=47359552