Corporate Power Beyond Lobbying
Résumé
First lines: The biases that private interests can introduce into politics have always been a key concern for democratic theory. Lobbying in particular has come into the focus of social science research since the beginning of the twentieth century.1 After a century of study, there is a general consensus that the freedom of political participation creates an unequal landscape: corporate actors find it much easier to promote their interests than do more fragmented or less well-endowed groups, especially those speaking on behalf of public interests. Ever since the publication of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action, exceptions only seem to prove the rule that perfect pluralist representation of all societal stakeholders is simply unattainable.2 What is more, it is easy to attribute the rise in economic inequalities to unequal political representation, and more specifically to consider excessive lobbying as the main cause of biased politics.