Lester Milbrath’s The Washington Lobbyists, 50 Years On: An Enduring Legacy

Abstract

Published in 1963, Lester Milbrath's The Washington Lobbyists has become indispensable for understanding how lobbying operates and the societal benefits it brings. Milbrath there presented the first detailed survey of lobbying activities, and his findings have been generally affirmed by a range of later studies, although his conviction that lobbying was an essentially benign force which exerted relatively little impact on policy has been more contested. Milbrath's theoretical model of lobbying as a communication process has enduring value to scholars and practitioners alike, and the definition of lobbying which he formulated continues to be useful. This article seeks explicitly to celebrate Milbrath's outstanding research on lobbyists, more than 50 years after his book was published, and highlights some elements of Milbrath's work which have not yet been fully explored by scholars. Political Studies Review Washington Lobbyists as a 'pioneering study'; Rosenthal (2001, p. 17) calls it 'one of the seminal studies' in the field; and Tichenor and Harris (2005, p. 252) include it as one of a few works which 'transformed interest group studies'. Continuity and Change in Washington Lobbying Whether Milbrath's analysis of lobbying in the late 1950s remains relevant to today's scholars and practitioners is a reasonable question (indeed, one raised by this journal's anonymous reviewers). Some argue, for instance, that Milbrath's is an unrealistic and overly benign view

Consultant Lobbyists and Public Officials: Selling Policy Expertise or Personal Connections in Canada?

“…Furthermore, as with many ideal-typologies (Aberbach et al, 1981; Dahl, 1971), the character of the phenomena as it actually exists may straddle analytical categories; nuances and hybrids are not uncommon. Accordingly, another body of research suggests that distinctions between lobbyists who sell access to public officials, and those who provide expertise, may overlook how personal connections and expertise are an interconnected aspect of lobbying (Bertrand et al, 2014; Chalmers, 2013; McGrath, 2017; Milbrath, 1963; Wise, 2007).…”

Public Affairs: A field's maturation from 2000+ to 2030

“…We owe the notion that lobbying is essentially a communicative process to the pioneering work of Lester Milbrath (1963) which utterly redefined how we think of interest representation and articulation (McGrath, 2018). Milbrath is perhaps the ultimate pluralist, seeing a collective dynamism in the voicing of diverse policy preferences by interest organizations.…”