The Room Where It Happens

January 6: Today the American Politics class had the opportunity to hear from Jerry Taylor of the Niskanen Center, where he works to influence political elites (mostly politicians) about policy. Following this we got hear from two William &  Mary alumni, who currently work as lobbyists.

Jerry Taylor began his career working at the CATO Institute in energy and public policy matters, but left a while after changing his mind on climate change. He also thought he should be working to more directly influence the decisions and opinions of policy makers. Taylor believes  the “best way to influence policy is by changing the minds of elites.” Among his reasons are: lack of engagement by the public, lack of correlation of policy change with public opinion, and public opinion being subject to question wording and other trivial changes. According to Taylor, most of the public is uninformed because they are not interested. Therefore, he focuses on those people actively involved in the political world. However, this can also have its own problems. People on both sides of the aisle can be dogmatic in their beliefs, even when well informed. Often people listen to ideas that support what they already believe.

Mainly, when people think of who is actively trying to influence politicians, they think of lobbyists. After lunch we had the opportunity to speak with Ben Jenkins and Mark Washko. They describe their jobs as to provide information, and to advocate their position. Most of the time they say that they have to make an argument for why this should matter to a particular Congressman coming from the perspective of why it is important in their district. Often they will use constituents to make their argument. They make lobbying sound representative, as long as the Congressmen put in the effort to be sure it is important and the right thing for their constituency.

Each session today offered a different view of how Congressmen are influence and how decisions are made. It will be interesting for the rest of the course to keep these different perspectives in mind and to think about the factors that go in to political decisions.

Until tomorrow,
Allie Thibault ’19
American Politics