Lobbying in the USA as a Competitive Tool

Abstract

The economic sphere of society in the United States is a highly competitive environment, within which there is a clash of various interest groups seeking to influence political decision-making in order to ensure the most favorable business conditions for themselves. The purpose of the study is to consider lobbying as a competitive tool for various business sectors in the United States. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks: to analyze the features of the economic sphere of US society as a competitive environment; to consider the legal basis for regulating lobbying activities in the United States; to determine the methods of lobbying; to analyze the overall structure of lobbying expenses in the United States and determine the share of business expenses in various sectors; to determine the place of the two leading political parties in the United States – Democratic and Republican – in the process of lobbying the interests of various business sectors and the reasons for such a difference. The study covers the period of the 2020 election cycle in the United States. The problem of lobbying the interests of business sectors is considered on the example of the competition between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. The work is based on a dialectical research method. According to the results of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that in the structure of lobbying activities, lobbying for business interests repeatedly prevails over lobbying for the interests of the non-profit sector. Lobbying is a form of competitive struggle, one of the ways to carry out competitive actions, an instrument of competition between various business sectors for the establishment of the most favorable conditions for their sector. According to the results of the 2020 presidential election, the communications and electronics sector won in the person of its key lobbyist, Democratic candidate Joe Biden. During the election campaign, both Trump and Biden used a marketing approach, “selling” their “political product” that expressed the interests of certain business sectors, certain groups of voters whose consumer preferences would allow them to “realize” this “product”. The intersectoral competition of various business sectors harmoniously integrated into the political competition of the two leading political parties in the United States.