There are two sides to this book. One side aims at describing, in much detail, the growth in corporate lobbying since the 1970s. By growth, Lee Drutman means the increases in the number of paid lobbyists working for corporations, trade associations, and general business groups. He shows the vast numerical disparities over the years, but especially huge disparities in the 1990s, between the total number of paid lobbyists working for business and the total number working for all other kinds of groups combined, including unions, nonprofits, and public-interest groups.

The other side is directed toward addressing questions about the causes of this overall increase in business lobbying and making claims about the implications. More social scientific in approach and incorporating statistical analyses and examining correlated trends, this side of the book centers around the general story that Drutman ultimately tells. His main argument places the incentives of lobbyists themselves at its center. Lobbyists as agents, through their actions, convince their principals (business managers) that lobbying is necessary and that companies will suffer the consequences of government actions if they do not hire more lobbyists and let them do their work. A feedback loop increases the presence of lobbyists, perpetuated, not only by convincing business managers that lobbyists are needed but also by the fact that, relative to the financial stakes involved, hiring lobbyists is inexpensive for many business corporations. General Electric, for instance, spent $20 million on lobbying in 2007—a large sum, for sure, but not much for that global conglomerate to influence the most serious threat or opportunity to its bottom line, the U.S. government.

I am sympathetic to Drutman’s overall theoretical argument, at least to the degree that it puts emphasis on the survivalist and self-perpetuating incentives of lobbyists. It rings true, and comports well with his extensive data and with other available evidence and research. As I will discuss, however, he misses some of the forest for the trees.

That said, The Business of America Is Lobbying does several groups of people an enormous service. The part of the book that describes the scale and trends in business lobbying in Washington, DC, serves as a valuable primer for those relatively unfamiliar with the environment on Capitol Hill, K Street, and the halls of executive agencies. Drutman systematically gathered data on the sheer volume of people engaged in lobbying in that small geographic area. He shows in convincing detail the overall trends. Clearly, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, the scale is huge, with around 14,000 registered lobbyists. And the scale is huge for individual corporations. “At its fullest expression,” he writes, “the modern corporate government relations operations employs upwards of 100 lobbyists, lobbying on upwards of 100 bills, and reaching out to 200 agencies” (p. 96). Companies like General Electric and AT&T engage with government across so many areas on so many policies, and the financial stakes are so massive, that they readily hire lobbyists to be both proactive and reactive at advancing their interests in Washington. This does not count, critically, what they do in state capitals. The book emphasizes the huge growth and huge scale of lobbying in the nation’s capital, and this understates the total political activity of business.

The parts of the book that address the reasons for the increase will also be of interest to scholars of American national politics. And on balance, there is much for this group of scholars to learn from this book. For me, Chapter 7 is the most valuable. It describes how lobbyists behave in a manner that collectively adds to the perception that they are necessary and worth the money. For instance, lobbyists have some discretion to pick the issues that they spend much of their time on, and they focus on those issues that show their benefits to the companies that hire them and shy away from issues on which they have difficulty influencing members of Congress. If possible, the lobbyists devote attention to issues that can make some (sometimes small) gains for companies. This has implications in that lobbyists can avoid issues with potentially big payoffs for the companies simply because of their own risk aversion.

I also found interesting Drutman’s findings from his survey of lobbyists on the degree to which lobbying is proactive compared to reactive. He shows evidence of much more proactive lobbying than that of previous studies, which have tended to find most lobbying reactive and protective of the status quo.

In the last chapter the author likewise makes an intriguing claim. Political scientists have long tried to study, with mixed success, the influence of lobbying. How often do lobbyists succeed in changing the direction of public policy? Under what circumstances do they succeed? Drutman first says something obvious: “[Lobbying] influence is unpredictable . . . contingent on so many confounding factors” (p. 219). Then why, we might ask, do companies keep increasing their lobbying presence, hiring more lobbyists and spending more on them? It could simply be that it is getting increasingly competitive across businesses and sectors. But Drutman says that the uncertainty of having an impact—the messy contingent nature of policymaking in Washington, which, he says, has increased over time—causes companies to hire more lobbyists, both to strike for gold in lobbying and also to protect their interests from various predators in a highly uncertain environment.

For scholars with experience studying lobbying and interest groups, the book also has some flaws. First, Drutman’s definitions, measurements, and methods have some looseness that takes away from the book’s impact on the academic study of lobbying. For instance, his definition of lobbying from the start is strikingly broad and does not match the measures he uses later: “Any activity oriented toward shaping public policy outcomes” (p. 15). The abrupt changes in measurement from the mid-1990s due to the reporting requirement in Washington are not incorporated throughout all the analyses reported in the book. Drutman uses lobbyists’ quotes sometimes to describe what he himself thinks is going on in Washington, and sometimes as data to describe what lobbyists themselves believe is going on in Washington, two distinct things. This distinction is not signaled in many places, however. Chapter 8 tries to debunk alternative theories for why the number of lobbyists has grown—size of government, attention by government (hearings, bills), and the size of companies. Drutman argues that none of these explanations fully work to explain the growth in the number of lobbyists by companies and business in general. I was not fully persuaded that he gave the alternative hypotheses their due. He does not test them with much rigor. But he seems to be right that there are additional factors beyond these that must be at work to explain the growth in the number of lobbyists.

Second, I earlier used the metaphor of the forest and the trees. Some of the aspects of the forest he misses in his overall argument are the various incentives of government actors, including legislators and their staffs, Executive Branch bureaucrats, and White House staff, to rely on lobbyists to conduct their work and justify their own actions. In fairness, he does discuss the neediness of government, and says repeatedly that the government and lobbyists rely on each other. The theoretical argument is one-sided, with a focus on lobbyists’ incentives and behaviors, when a richer theoretical approach would find explanatory power in the mutual neediness of three sets of actors—business managers, lobbyists, and government actors. And while I realize the challenges of incorporating too much in any research study, and acknowledge the need for parsimony and focused attention on certain mechanisms to do them justice, Drutman pays little attention to the entire reason that elected government actors listen to lobbyists: they need to make constituents happy in order to win reelection. This is the driving force in Washington, the prime mover, and Drutman places it outside of his theory of lobbying growth. He focuses on certain trees while not incorporating the most important motivating force in the forest. And in doing so he misses key components in an explanation for the growth of business lobbying: the broader context shaped by changes in the nature of the intense fight for control of elected positions in Congress and the White House.

The Business of America Is Lobbying has much to recommend it, and it will justifiably take its position as a key book to read on Washington lobbying in the contemporary era. I recommend it to both political scientists and people generally interested in the lobbying scene in Washington.