By Christy DeSmith, Harvard Staff Writer, Harvard Gazette, April 22, 2024.
A new study reveals the secret world of lawyers who earn top dollar lobbying government regulators.
“Most people think of lobbying as something that happens in Congress,” said political scientist Daniel Carpenter, the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and chair of the Department of Government. “We’re pointing to lobbying that happens in administrative agencies.”
The research, published recently in the journal Perspectives on Politics, specifically pulls back the curtain on regulatory advocates — almost always attorneys — with clients in the U.S. finance sector. Carpenter and his co-author drew from a variety of empirical sources, including years of meeting logs kept by government administrators following passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. They found a regulatory advocacy market so large, and so lucrative, it eclipses the formal lobbying sector….
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