Taxation, representation and the corporation: an ethics of lobbying

Abstract

Corporations warp the democratic process. They are rich, powerful, and able to mobilize resources in a way that individuals, and even some governments, are not. As actors in democracies, corporations are purely self-seeking, working only to maximize their own profits. The common good, when it stands in a corporation’s way, is trampled underfoot. The main way in which corporations exercise their influence is to lobby. Lobbying, the charge runs, happens behind closed doors, while a representative government should conduct itself in the open. Lobbying, thus, is antithetical to representative government. And not only is corporate lobbying unrepresentative. Its pervasiveness is such that it has come to undermine representative government itself. In this thesis, I look at the place of corporate lobbying in representative government. To get a handle on why lobbying is wrong (if it is wrong), I need a theory of representative government. I develop this in the first half of this treatise. In the second half, I apply this to the specific case of corporate lobbying. Although I do not draw any specific conclusions, it is not my intention to do so. What I seek to do, rather, is to articulate the issues at stake. I do so in the hope that those involved in corporate lobbying are themselves better equipped to understand the legitimate place in representative government of lobbying, and so to form their own judgments of when they cross from the legitimate into the danger zone.