How susceptible are politicians to the influence of lobbyists? A new study used a data analysis technique to track how an important policy directive changed alongside a big push from a notoriously vehement lobbying group: the tobacco industry.
The result sheds light on just how much clout the highly-funded lobbying industry has in influencing the democratic process.
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Researchers led by political economist and sociologist David Stuckler at the University of Oxford observed the evolution of drafts of the EU Tobacco Products Directive, which was revised starting 2009. The EU set about reexamining regulations around the marketing and sale of tobacco, and the researchers note that the revision process was fraught from the outset and the tobacco industry lobbied intensely to stall or prevent the revision.
Classically, it’s very difficult to see what the effects of lobbying are
“We noticed it had been delayed, bogged down, and on both sides of the process activists in public health were accusing tobacco companies of bias and tobacco companies were accusing public health organisations of bias,” Stuckler told me in a phone interview.
In their paper, published in the BMJ journal Tobacco Control, the team set to investigate what really happened in a more objective way, by looking at the actual text of the directive.
“Classically, it’s very difficult to see what the effects of lobbying are, in part because it takes place behind closed doors where there are no data,” said Stuckler.
By looking at the exact wording of the policy as it went through different drafts, they could extract data in an objective manner, the aim being to settle how the policy really changed against the backdrop of lobbying from both sides.
Using an automated content analysis tool called Wordscores, they gave each of the three main policy drafts a score based on how closely they corresponded with lobbyists’ viewpoints. The program compared the language used in the drafts with that used in texts from the tobacco industry on one side, and health organisations on the other.
As policy shifted from the consultation stage to actual legislation, the text itself was demonstrably shifted towards the interests of the tobacco lobby. Image: Tobacco Control
For example, the tobacco industry texts tended to use more arguments about the economy, so when text relating to this point was found in the draft directive, it would likely be coded as closer to their position.
On the other side of the debate, a table in the report shows that the word “health” was used almost twice as much on average in the texts from health NGOs than those from industry.
The researchers argue that the automated procedure meant the method was free of subjective biases that could come into play if the words were coded by hand.
what see is a striking correspondence between heavy pressure from the tobacco industry and movement to favour the tobacco industry
To get an overall picture of how the policy had changed, the system assigned each draft a value, with 0 representing the position of the tobacco industry and 1 the position of the health lobbyists. The first draft started out almost band in the middle at 0.52, but the last draft—the legislation that came into effect this year—ended up scoring 0.4, a significant shift towards the tobacco lobbyists.
“We cannot fully demonstrate why exactly it moved that way, but what we can see is a striking correspondence between heavy pressure from the tobacco industry and movement to favour the tobacco industry,” said Stuckler. “If the policy changes were neutral, we would have seen it hovering around the middle of the scale.”
The authors concluded that for this to happen around the time that Big Tobacco was spending big bucks on lobbying was concerning, especially given the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control guidelines, which hold policy makers to a legal obligation to “protect tobacco control from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry.”
Stuckler described the data analysis tool as a way to independently judge the winners and losers of a policy. And in this case, he said, “It raises concerns about whether government systems in the EU are sufficient to uphold the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.”
