Interest groups and lobbying | Political participation | US government and civics | Khan Academy

Let's discuss interest groups. As you can see here, it is one of the three parts of the iron triangle that we first studied when we looked at the bureaucracy in the executive branch. The whole point of the iron triangle is to show how these different parties can influence each other.

Just as a reminder, an interest group is any collection of folks who organize in order to advocate for something in public policy. This could be groups of corporations; it could represent an industry, or it could represent a social cause. We're going to look at some major interest groups in the United States in a few minutes, but some can be quite large, and some can be quite small. What you see from the iron triangle is how these parties can influence each other.

An interest group can give electoral support to a member of Congress by getting its members to go out and vote for that member of Congress or maybe even doing advertising for that member of Congress or giving direct financial support. In exchange, they might get friendly legislation and oversight. That'll happen because the Congress person who got that support from the interest group might have a friendly ear to that interest group and might be open to hanging out with lobbyists from that interest group.

The term "lobbyist" or "lobbying" is believed to originate in 17th-century England, where people who wanted to influence members of Parliament would hang out in the lobby of the parliamentary building, waiting to talk to those members of Parliament. That's what essentially lobbyists do today; they try to meet with Congress people or meet with the staff of Congress people and try to influence the types of bills that are introduced to Congress for consideration and how various members should vote for those bills.

Now, bureaucracy—these are the folks who, for the most part, are doing the work of actually running the government, and they have influence. They can dictate what regulations are going to be and who gets various contracts. You can imagine that might be of interest to interest groups.

To make tangible what some of these interest groups are, you have entities like the AFL-CIO, which stands for the American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations. This is a meta-organization of a bunch of labor unions, and as you can imagine, they're going to advocate for labor-friendly policies. It might be things that favor the manufacturing industry or that favor employees' rights to collectively negotiate with their employer; it might be advocating for trade policies that would be perceived as more friendly to the American worker. Its membership is roughly 12 and a half million people, so just getting them out to vote can have a significant influence on elections.

You have groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. What's interesting here is that this membership of over 300,000 isn't just individuals; this includes corporations. Even though the Chamber of Commerce does not have the biggest budget of the groups we're going to look at, it is actually consistently the biggest lobbying group, spending most of this money on lobbying. They're going to try to advocate for business-friendly policies in our government.

You have groups that advocate for social causes, like the NAACP. They don't have a huge budget, but they are considered very, very influential when it comes to issues surrounding minority rights. You also have very influential groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA). When we compare the NRA to some of these other groups, it's interesting to think about the number of issues they concentrate their efforts on.

For example, the Chamber of Commerce might be thinking about a very broad array of policy decisions that might affect commerce and businesses, while the National Rifle Association and its members—this is a significant membership—are likely to be much more focused on a narrower set of issues around gun rights and gun ownership.

You have the American Medical Association, which, despite its relatively small membership, is highly, highly influential because these 240,000 people are, for the most part, physicians whom many of us are very used to listening to. You have the American Association for Retired Professionals, which has a membership of 37 million people and a budget of 1.6 billion. So these entities can be very large and very, very influential.

Now, as I mentioned, not all of these dollars go directly to lobbying. They could be spending money on voter education, on legal funds to advocate for cases that are in their interest, giving direct support to various candidates or parties, or advertising in the media for their cause.

But if we think about direct lobbying, this chart right over here is quite interesting. It comes from OpenSecrets.org, and if you're really intrigued by understanding more of how money and influence come together in American politics, I encourage you to go to their site. This is a list from 2017 of the top spenders in lobbying in the United States.

As I mentioned, you see here at the top the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at 82 million dollars. This isn't even the most they've ever spent in a year; there are some years where it is well over a hundred and fifty million dollars. The National Association of Realtors, the Business Roundtable, and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America—this money is for the most part to pay lobbyists who will meet with members of our government to directly advocate for certain policies.

Now, an interesting thing to think about is what positive things might be done by interest groups and what potentially negative things might be there, and how equitable is this system. The positive things folks could argue are, hey, they could work on voter education. Many issues that policymakers are trying to decide on are quite complex, so it might be good to have experts weighing in.

But on the other hand, it might seem like money is disproportionately influential, and that industries that generate a lot of money could have a disproportionate amount of influence. They could potentially use that influence to further benefit those industries, giving them even more power and influence. So I will let you decide.