Lobbying for Change

by Alberto Alemanno

  Max epitomises citizen lobbying. He occupied the space left vacant by regulators, enforcers and civil society organisations. We need more Max Schrems in the world, and I hope he will inspire others. Max himself drew inspiration from Edward Snowden, another citizen lobbyist, whose whistle-blowing revealed the largest surveillance system ever deployed by a democratic country.

  Jon Worth, a Briton who lives in Berlin, is a self-made campaigner who devotes his life to denouncing political abuses. He persistently spends hours every day monitoring – predominantly on Twitter – the action of many national and European members of parliament. He flags up their abuses, inconsistencies and acts in what he believes to be the public interest. Jon is a citizen lobbyist.

  Mari Takenouchi has been an anti-nuclear activist since 1999. In 2011 she and her son were living near the Fukushima plant in Japan. Since then, as an independent journalist, she has been fighting – with the Save Kids Japan association – for recognition of the harmful effects even low-level radiation has on children. In 2014, she took to task a nuclear lobbyist and former Japanese premier on Twitter for encouraging locals to return to their homes near the crippled plant. She alleged that the Ethos group he was supporting, driven underground by the French nuclear multinational Areva, intended to conduct live experiments on humans. Mari has undergone several interrogations by the Japanese police and risks a prison sentence. Her case has attracted the attention of the international community and triggered several campaigns and petitions, notably by Reporters Without Borders. They have shone a light on the largely hidden links between nuclear lobbyists and the Japanese government. Mari is a citizen lobbyist.

  Ben Goldacre, a brilliant British physician and academic, decided after years of serious research to start writing to sensitise the UK population to what he called ‘bad science’. In 2012 he showed that a substantial proportion of medical research goes unpublished (estimates range from one-third to one-half). In particular, he highlighted that thousands of clinical trials have not reported their results; some have not even been registered. Information on what was done and what was found in these trials could be lost forever to doctors and researchers, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine and trials being repeated. He has also shown that negative findings are less likely to be published than positive ones, even in the absence of conflicts of interest.

  Against this backdrop, Ben launched AllTrials, a campaign countering the phenomenon of under-reporting of clinical trials and advocating that clinical research adopt the principles of open research. The project summarises itself as ‘All trials registered, all results reported’: that is, all clinical trials should be listed in a registry and their results should always be shared as open data. At the heart of the organisation is a petition signed by over 85,000 individuals and 599 organisations. Ben is a citizen lobbyist.

  Regardless of whether you care about matters of general public interest, such as consumer and patient rights (like Sofia in India and Ben in the UK), data protection (like Max in Europe), environmental protection (like Mari in Japan), public health (like Alejandro and Elaine in Mexico), the accountability of our elected representatives (like Jon in the EU) or whether you care about people whose voices go unheard, turning yourself into a citizen lobbyist can empower you. It can empower anyone who wants to affect the way policy is decided.

  You can have ‘a say’ and even make a positive difference to other people’s lives as an individual, as an organisation or both. And, as these examples show, you don’t have to become an expert or understand all the intricacies of the policymaking process to be a good lobbyist. You just need passion for your cause and the ability to communicate it. Hard facts will also help. Citizen lobbying is cheap, fulfilling and you can do it from anywhere in the world. Just pick your cause.

  By providing a counterweight to special interests, citizen lobbyists can improve the quality of policymaking. In the same way, they can hold consumer and pressure groups to genuinely acting in the public interest. Citizen lobbying hones the quality of policymaking while giving all of us a chance to learn about how government works.

  This book explores both the dark and light sides of lobbying as it is deployed by both professional lobbyists and citizens. And it shows how corporations can use lobbying to support and build on a commitment to trading responsibly. There’s no reason why the right cause shouldn’t unite citizens and corporations to work together to change policy.

  Why This Book?

  Building on my personal experience as educator, scholar and civic advocate, this book offers a guide to becoming an effective citizen lobbyist in your daily life. It proposes a 10-step strategy to make you comfortable with lobbying – and get you doing it!

  This is not an academic book. This is a volume that aspires to reach a broader audience, and to inspire you. It is not intended to contribute to the academic debate per se, but instead to build upon the insights academic theory offers in order to nurture an entirely different discussion: how to persuade ourselves that the break with our daily routine is worth it. It even tells you how to do it.

  These are the three main goals of this book:

  To share and promote an innovative form of do-it-yourself citizenship aimed at empowering ordinary citizens at a time of unprecedented social, economic and political volatility.

  To demystify and democratise lobbying as a legitimate and healthy component of the democratic process.

  To inspire a new generation of advocates, activists and engaged citizens to get involved in the unfashionable world of government.

  Regardless of where you come from and what you do in life, every one of us has the capacity to be an effective citizen lobbyist. We have boundless reserves of untapped talent, energy and knowledge. You will be amazed at what you can achieve once you start to make lobbying part of your life.

  Lobbying for Change is a down-to-earth, practical guide that will enable you to engage with the things that matter to you and to make an immediate impact on the world around you. I hope you will – because by embracing citizen lobbying, you can breathe life back into democracy and empower yourself and your community.

  Throughout the book, you will find three types of extra content to inform and inspire you:

  TIP

  These boxes contain useful tips that complement the guidance provided in the main text.

  ACTIVITY

  These boxes suggest activities for you to try out what you have learned.

  STORY

  These boxes contain real-life examples of successful (and unsuccessful) instances of citizen lobbying. They offer practical illustrations of the dos and don’ts when using the toolbox.

  PART I

  THE PROBLEM

  Powerless

  ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’

  Edmund Burke

  Many of us feel like spectators nowadays. Regardless of where we come from and what we do in life, despite the wealth and opportunities our societies offer, we feel overwhelmed and hopeless in the face of mounting challenges. We have never enjoyed so many opportunities to have a say in shaping our democratic societies. Yet we feel too feeble and helpless to do anything about it. We don’t always grasp why this is.

  Powerlessness has a profound effect on our physiology and mental capacity.1 It amplifies our response to stress which, in the long run, damages the brain. This in turn inhibits our ability to function and engage with the world. It damages our individual and collective well-being.2

  Many factors can explain why we feel so powerless – including an intriguing bystander effect that reinforces inaction3 – but four things, all of them interconnected, are central to it:

  Nobody speaks for you: the unequal distribution of power;

  You’re not in the club: the distance between voters and decision-makers;

  Nobody teaches you: the disconnect between our schools and reality;

  Somebody decides for you: powerlessne
ss by design.

  We’re about to look at these in more detail. The remaining parts of this book will tackle what we can do about them.

  Nobody Speaks for You: the Unequal Distribution of Power

  ‘The reality of political life is that the voice that shouts the loudest is the most likely to be heard, no matter how numerous the silent majority, no matter how just their cause.’

  Brian Stipelman4

  How can you feel powerless in a democracy? Doesn’t democracy mean that power belongs to the people? At least that’s what we learn at school. World leaders assure us that it’s so. They may even compare our modern democracies with the ideal of the first known democracy in Athens. The truth, however, is that during the fourth century BC, there were probably no more than 100,000 people belonging to citizen families in Athens. In other words, about 30,000 adult male citizens were entitled to vote in the assembly.5 If we, like the Athenians, lived in a small community where everyone could discuss issues of common interest, better their understanding in public debates, identify and assess available options and their consequences and eventually reach an informed consensus on what to do (based on universal suffrage and by a majority of individual voting), then we too might have a ‘true’ democracy.

  Unfortunately, there are too many of us to make that work, and the delegation of political power is a necessary (if minor) evil. Indeed, the original idea of democracy, as the Ancient Greeks conceived it, was soon adapted by the Greeks themselves into an indirect, representative system that, wittingly or unwittingly, disempowered citizens (so as to empower them through their representatives). That’s what we call representative democracy.

  The 19th-century English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill explained it as:

  the participation should everywhere be as great as the general degree of improvement of the community will allow … But since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be representative.6

  Indeed, representative democracy is often considered a compromise which is forced on us by practical constraints. But there is another case for it.

  It also tempers high emotion and the ensuing violence of the majority. That’s why we entrust a few citizens – today’s politicians – with the task of governing us in our countries’ best interests.7 That’s why today our political power is limited to expressing a preference for a candidate (sometimes not even that, due to the electoral system) or a party, rather than taking a stance on every single issue.

  Under the model of representative democracy, we decided to raise up a governing elite who should be able, as US President and founding father James Madison saw it:

  to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a model, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.8

  This vision has spread over time across liberal democracies, from France to Austria, from Germany to Spain. As a result, decisions are distanced from everyday people and delegated to their representatives. In other words, we deliberately established a governing elite. So it is no surprise that a small group of professional politicians – rather than us – do most of the public speaking and take the decisions on issues of broad concern.9 It sounds like a fair division of labour: our representatives take care of the big challenges, since they are best able to do so, and we can spend our lives focusing on our own concerns without having to give much thought to what is happening in our society. Despite some disgracefully bad outcomes, this system has worked reasonably well for the last couple of centuries.

  But today, elections, which made democracy possible, are the fossil fuel of politics. After giving democracy ‘a huge boost, now they cause colossal problems’.10 Our role as citizens, limited to voting every few years, is frequently sidelined and usually cosmetic. We think of government as them, not us. The Austrian-born US economist, Joseph Schumpeter likened democracy to a free market mechanism where parties (firms) have to sell the electorate (customers) the best policy in order to win their votes.11 In other words, political candidates compete for votes in the same way firms compete for customers. This procedural understanding of democracy, which is partly shared by philosophers such as Max Weber and Norberto Bobbio, seems to legitimise a situation in which people play a minimal role in political life. It speaks to a commodification of politics. But democracy can’t be reduced to voting. Elections cannot be an end in themselves.

  Delegating the workings of democracy made sense when communication and access to knowledge were limited. But it is completely out of touch with the way we interact with each other and learn today. Even as long ago as the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed:

  The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of members of parliament; for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing.12

  If democracy boils down to a method of choosing political leaders, there is no room for a community to emerge that can tell the elected what citizens are thinking. As predicted by Mill, ‘Let a person have nothing to do for his country and he will not care for it’.13

  Despite these powerful reminders, the centralised systems of authority we find in today’s representative democracies not only accept but actually reward political passivity. The habit is institutionally and culturally encouraged in each of us. How so? As it has recently been proven, what determines our political behaviour, in particular voting, is group identity and party loyalty rather than our policy preferences.14 This explains why elections typically fail to result in popular control of public policy. It’s no wonder we feel powerless; the system is structured so that we can’t vote on individual policy issues. We are not supposed to be in control.

  But could it be any other way? Any system of government needs administrators to carry out decisions. We have busy lives, little interest in the technicalities of decision-making and limited mental bandwidth. Evidence confirms that ordinary citizens do no master the intricacies of political issues.15 Yet we – citizens – are expected to hold accountable those we hired to represent us, through a set of counterpower mechanisms. Political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon refers to them as ‘counterdemocracy’.16 This is the essence of representative democracy and its intrinsic division of labour between them and us: those who hold power do not exercise it, but delegate it to those who exercise it but do not hold it. This is the key (yet often neglected) distinction between sovereignty (us) and governance (them).

  But in order to hold officials accountable, we need to know them, and how many of us know our elected officials at a local, state and – if you are an EU citizen – European level? Only a small minority. Fusion’s Massive Millennial Survey showed that 77 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds could not name one of their senators in the US.17 Similarly, 75 per cent of Britons are unable to name their MP.18 Worse, just one in ten can identify their local Member of the European Parliament, according to the Guardian.19 Similar trends are found across the world.

  In these circumstances, we shouldn’t be surprised that most of our politicians are persistently indifferent to us – except, of course, at election time when they court us for our votes. They respond instead to the affluent and organised. And in doing so they give the impression that not all citizens deserve equal consideration.

  Voting is supposed to equalise power: the wealthy and the poor all have one vote and should equally be offered the opportunity to voice their concerns. This conclusion flies in the face of today’s democratic realities. In particular, the contras
t with our online experience, where each of us can speak our mind and expect our views to be considered and acted upon, is stark. This disconnect between our digitally-enabled lives as consumers and the low-tech, offline world of politics is sharper than ever. While our model of representative democracy rests on the premise that the elected respond to our opinion and represent the public interest, the practice of political representation – as experienced by all of us – proves that wrong. Without an equal voice for every citizen, there cannot be equal consideration of interests. As a result, there is a widespread belief that our votes do not really matter. Martin Gilens of Princeton University recently confirmed this conclusion with compelling evidence that the opinions of the bottom 90 per cent of income earners in America have a ‘statistically non-significant impact’. As a result, the preferences of economic elites, business interests and people who can afford lobbyists have ‘far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do’.20 Other studies have demonstrated that the large majority of the population, in particular those on lower incomes, are effectively excluded from the political system. Their opinions are systematically ignored by the elected representatives, while the preferences of a tiny segment of the richest have overwhelming influence.21

  The fundamental problem in this system is that one set of interests systematically overpowers the others. The most powerful players in the policy game are the wealthy, the educated and the well-connected. Partisan interests, notably but not exclusively corporate ones, have the most resources, skills and commitment to participate in the day-to-day workings of government. As a result, even in the most democratic countries, we, the citizens, have only limited impact on policy decisions. You probably live in a democracy. But how democratic really is it?