SNA of Lobbying Organizations

Takumi Onuma

(I am not taking the second module in this year.)

Background

Public policy influences business activities. For example, government officials can facilitate renewable energy business by introducing policy support such as subsidy, tax-breaks, and feed-in-tariff mechanism. This is an example where politics and business are interacted.

In the United States, unlike Japan, many lobbying organizations seem to act eagerly to create optimal business context. Such activities involve a lobbying coalition, and the chances of a successful outcome are usually greater when organizations pool their material and political resources into a joint policy campaign[i]. Although understanding this mechanism is important, it may be difficult, in a traditional academic context, to demonstrate how lobbying groups persuade policy makers to implement a specific policy, and how policy makers attract lobbying groups to win an election, because we face difficulty in finding experimental and objective evidences. However, we can gather data about social movements, such as how people come together, and how they support an influential candidate. Here is the chance for applying social network analysis (SNA), because such collective action can be seen as a kind of network forms.

Research Questions

1. How the structure of lobbying organizations is described?
2. Does a lobbying organization form coalition with others? If true, how it do? Do external social media contribute to this process significantly? Is it just a result of internal interest?

Data Collection

1. In order to map the existing lobbying organizations, I will quote secondary data on demographics of lobbyists, such as OpenSecrets.Org[ii]. This data will indicate numbers, spending, relationship between political candidates.
2. For the sake of grasping coalition process, I will search adequate number of organizations’ HP, and check their public relations, such as social media.
3. To measure the influence, I will get statistics about how many bills are submitted and approved/denied by each supported candidate. I will also extract an interesting political/business theme to make my analysis simple.
4. I will get deep insight by interviewing small samples.

Methodology

First, I will draw two-mode network about lobbying organizations and political candidates by using UCINET. I will process the secondary data to visualize;

• Which organization has an experience about contacting other organizations?
• Which organization supported a particular candidate?

Second, into the data, I will add attribute such as;

• Organization itself; how much budget it had? How many times it took action?
• Organization and other organizations; what relationships, such as collaboration or conflict, existed? How many times the interaction could be observed? What was agenda?
• Organization and candidates; how many times an organization supported a candidate? How much did they support? What was agenda?

In order to measure the tie strength, I will distinguish and order such quantitative data as a variable.

Third, I will analyze the network. My plan is;

• Analyze the centrality in the two-mode network. I will identify the influence by measuring betweenness and eigenvector of each organization. Because betweenness indicates node on the most paths between other nodes (which infers acquiring excellent know-how and evidences), and because eigenvector indicates node connected to other well-connected nodes (which infers having big influence and power), measuring these degree would specify the most influential organization.
• Analyze the tie strength between organizations. By reviewing the frequency in which they interact with others via social media, I will identify the correlation of intimacy with others and these interactions.

Fourth, I will also advance the analysis. In this step;

• I will transform this network into a directed network. For example, if a candidate acted in favor of a particular organization (i.e. agreed with a favorable bill, stated a favorable manifesto), then define it as a directed network from a candidate to an organization.
• I will dig into revealing relationships among organizations by adding in-degree and out-degree into the previous analysis.

Hypothesis and Summary

Through this SNA project, I will find out that how the structure of lobbying organizations is described, and how they form coalition with others. One hypothesis which is tested is that social media plays a significant role to urge this coalition process. Also, I will test another hypothesis that lobbying organization which frequently uses social media has greater influence for both organizations and policy makers than the other organizations which do not use frequently. Although further research will be needed, I hope this project offers a hint to understand a part of lobbying mechanism.

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[i] John Scott and Peter J. Carrington, “The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis”, p211

[ii] http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/