When lobbying for or against regulation, interest groups use different argumentation strategies to persuade policymakers. Lobbyists may claim that a law is (not) in the public interest, emphasise the costs of a proposed policy, or highlight its expected benefits. Yet, despite their apparent predictability, such arguments are empirically difficult to identify and analyse.
One reason is that much lobbying takes place behind closed doors, limiting researchers’ access to relevant data. Moreover, inequalities between resource-rich actors such as large corporations and less well-resourced civil-society organisations are reflected in both the volume and sophistication of their arguments, resulting in quite heterogeneous data. On top, lobbying argumentation is inherently strategic: lobbyists may have good reasons to communicate their positions indirectly rather than explicitly, which adds to the challenges of analysing lobbying arguments reliably.
This keynote reports from the struggles of detecting and analysing argumentation strategies in Big Business lobbying from a communication science perspective. Drawing on examples from Big Tech lobbying and the chemicals industry, it discusses how researchers can identify and examine strategic argumentation in the political context.
