Interest Groups & Advocacy
Volume 4
Number 1
March 2015
Contents
Special Issue: Learning to Lobby
EDITORIAL
Learning to lobby
Conor McGrath
1
ORIGINAL ARTICLES
Learnable skills, or unteachable instinct? What can and what cannot
be taught in the lobbying profession
Thomas T. Holyoke, Heath Brown and Timothy M. LaPira
The moving stages of public affairs in the Netherlands
Arco Timmermans
Teaching public policy advocacy by combining academic knowledge
and professional wisdom
Patrick Griffin and James A. Thurber
7
25
40
An academic program for public affairs in Austria
Julia Wippersberg, Nicole Wagner and Klaus Lojka
52
The role of education in advancing the lobbying profession
Howard Marlowe
65
Recruiting the competent lobbyist: Career options and employer
demands in Germany
Marco Althaus
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76
Original Article
Recruiting the competent lobbyist: Career options
and employer demands in Germany
Marco Althaus
Department of Business, Computing and Law, Wildau Technical University of Applied Sciences,
Wildau 15745, Germany.
marco.althaus@th-wildau.de
Abstract Germany likely employs Europe’s largest national lobby labor force. This
article presents a comprehensive study of German lobbyists’ workplaces and employer
expectations of competencies. It provides insights into emerging requirements for a
qualified workforce in a diversified job market. Drawing on multiple sources of statistics, surveys and cases, the first section examines staffing and entry routes for the main
employer types – associations, corporations and consultancies. The job market offers a
broad range of career options. This includes an emerging set of junior training programs. German employers have devised fully paid apprenticeship models as structured
practical learning schemes where rotating workplace assignments alternate with seminar
learning. Some employers partner in training alliances. Traineeships are tailor-made and
unregulated, but their existence points to a growing employer interest in formally
developing a talent base and professionalism. The second section offers a job market
snapshot based on 189 advertisements from 2012 to 2014. Job ads can be assumed to be
an objective measure of employers’ articulated intentions and expectations for a quality
pool of applicants. The survey tabulates preferences for experience, academic degrees,
knowledge areas, personal, social and method competencies, and specific political
expert skills. Results demonstrate a complex interplay of qualifications and requirements. Ads also show great variety and ambiguity, suggesting that lobbying lacks
standardized job classifications and a stable common vocabulary. Findings show that
organizational settings influence task and competency combinations expressed in job
ads. While all employers appear to follow similar recruiting patterns in regard to some
qualifications, they also differ. For example, associations and businesses place more
emphasis on policy concepts, organizational participation, coordination, administration
and direct representation than do consultancies, while the latter stress advisory roles and
strategizing. Corporations get less involved in campaign advocacy. Associations focus
on members. Consulting firms tend to recruit younger, less experienced staff, and to less
often request domain knowledge. Highlighting commonalities and differences, this
article may help stimulate discussion on explicating employers’ competency-based
human capital management and recruiting practices. The results may help develop
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2047-7414 Interest Groups & Advocacy
www.palgrave-journals.com/iga/
Vol. 4, 1, 76–100
Recruiting the competent lobbyist
guidelines for apprenticeship schemes, continuing education, organized efforts of professional bodies and university curricula.
Interest Groups & Advocacy (2015) 4, 76–100. doi:10.1057/iga.2014.28;
published online 3 February 2015
Keywords: employment; Germany; interest groups; lobbying; professionalization;
training
Germany likely employs Europe’s largest national lobby labor force. Its formation
can be traced back to the late 1800s. At the dawn of Germany’s ‘century of
associations’ (Eschenburg, 1991),1 a unique managerial class emerged: ‘Verbandsbeamte’, literally, association civil servants. Untrained, learning on the fly, they
‘organized the interests which they themselves did not have’ (Ullmann, 1988,
p. 118). Developing human resources systematically came slowly and has not been
the lobby’s strong suit by German standards. It is a country which takes pride in
quality work based on orderly career paths, vocational education and formal
credentials, and where collective mental programming prizes uncertainty avoidance
by relying on well-trained experts (Hofstede, 2014).
The question of what and how lobbyists should learn has gained attention in the
past 15 years, spurred by the 1999 Bonn – Berlin capital move. More than a movingvan episode, it catalyzed culture. Sober scholars noted that the lobby ‘Berlinized’
(von Alemann, 2002). Young guns and self-styled barbarians engaged in hyberbole:
the ‘public affairs boomtown’ Berlin meant ‘a quantum leap’ and the ‘end of Bonn
coziness’, consultant Axel Wallrabenstein wrote in 2002 (p. 428). Looser, competitive, project-style direct representation and advocacy campaigns emerged as
corporatism and association dominance waned: ‘The Berlin Republic is noisier,
faster and more chaotic than the Bonn Republic, but also more transparent and
public’ (Wallrabenstein, 2002, p. 428). The neopluralist market today is a crowded
room. Bonn had counted 2000 lobbyists (Broichhausen, 1982, p. 35). Berlin
estimates today are around 5000 (Alexander et al, 2013). The scene extends to 16
federal states, an EU and global network.
For Germans, lobbying is a loan word from English. Outside of professional
parlance, Germans often say ‘lobbyism’ – note the ‘ism’ suffix, implying a whole
system. In 1998, Ronit and Schneider held that state – interest groups relations ‘are
almost never described as of lobbying’: it is ‘a foreign word with connotations of
secretive policy processes where illegitimate influence is sought’ (p. 559). It implies
influence seekers are state-unrecognized and not routinely involved in policy-making.
Traditional preference is for the ballast-free term ‘Interessenvertretung’, or interest
representation. To call it lobbying was a smear. Today’s use is more liberal. ‘The rise
of the Anglo-Saxon term lobbying is a result of changes in the interest intermediation
system’, notes Speth (2010, p. 9).
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2047-7414
Interest Groups & Advocacy
Vol. 4, 1, 76–100
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