Foreign Interest Groups and American Foreign Policy.

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Lobbying has long been a controversial issue among politicians, academics, and, most importantly, American voters. One particularly contentious aspect of the phenomenon is lobbying by foreign principals: countries, foreign political parties, foreign MNCs, or foreign nationals that lobby Congress, the executive branch, or administrative agencies in an attempt to change US policy to benefit the foreign principal. Despite the controversies, little useful knowledge actually exists about the policy areas or circumstances under which foreign lobbies influence US foreign policy. Extant research is usually based on anecdotal cases and often privileges normative judgment over social science. As a result, very little systematic evidence sheds light on when or how foreign entities lobby American decision-makers. Nor is it known to what end they do so.In seeking to answer these important questions, this research capitalizes on data that is already provided to the Department of Justice (DoJ) as part of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). When foreign interest groups hire American lobbyists, they must register their activities with the DoJ and this information is subsequently submitted to Congress in semi-annual reports. To date, however, no analysis of these data has been conducted to understand general trends about when foreign principles lobby the US, how foreign principals lobby the US, and what the "return" on these foreign lobbying efforts comprises. This is surprising given that the law was enacted prior to World War II.The project will first create an accessible database using FARA reports from the past 50 years (only the previous 10 years are currently accessible). The database can be used by scholars, practitioners, and citizens alike to track lobbying efforts by foreign principals from any country. The investigator will integrate the FARA data with data from other databases (specifically, Federal Election Commission [FEC] data and Legislative Disclosure Act [LDA] data) to gain a full picture of international-oriented lobbying. Combining these data sources will also allow an examination of what influence tactics are used by foreign principals: supporting candidates in elections (FEC); direct lobbying of individual decision-makers (LDA); or hiring traditional lobbying firms that engage in any manner of lobbying on behalf of the foreign principal (FARA).Second, the researcher will use the data to answer the questions posed above: who lobbies, over what issues, and to what end? In a pilot study using ten years of FARA reports, initial analysis in one area of U.S. foreign policy, trade tariffs, suggested that more lobbying by countries, in terms of both the amount of money spent and the number of contracts awarded to American lobbyists by foreign principals, decreases US tariff rates towards those countries. This result holds even when accounting for a host of other factors influencing tariff rates. A more comprehensive database of foreign principal lobbying will enable an extension of the pilot study and expand the investigation into numerous other areas such as foreign aid disbursements, human rights ratings and denouncements, and economic sanctions. The new data will permit evaluation of old and new conjectures about foreign lobbies in a careful, systematic fashion, rather than relying on single case studies of lobbies.Staking out new ground, the project is designed to define whether, when, and how international lobbying efforts change American foreign policy in a systematic fashion. The research findings should thus be likely to lead to a more informative debate about the phenomenon. Moreover, the findings should provide guidance to policymakers who wish to revise current rules on lobbying by indicating where lobbying efforts are concentrated and isolating any effects they may have.