Indirect Quid-Pro-Quo

We first discovered the Lobbyist's Loop of Deceit when I was mentoring a client doing a network analysis of the recent Lobbying Scandals in Washington. This pattern was most noticeable in the network of Jack Abramoff and his lobbying ecosystem.

Abramoff's clients often wanted to affect legislation in the House or Senate. To avoid an appearance of a direct quid-pro-quo, Abramoff engineered an indirect quid-pro-quo that put great social distance between the client and what they wanted to influence.

The Lobbyist's Loop of Deceit is mapped below. It reveals no direct contact between the client and the target legislation. The greater the social distance between the two, the greater the plausible deniability of both the client and the politician when they are accused of participating in favors/corruption. The lobbyist wants to hide what is happening below the yellow line in the diagram.

A direct quid-pro-quo would have an arrow of benefit/money flow going directly from the Client to the Legislator -- thus creating a tight [and obvious] triangle between the three key nodes in the network...

[Client --> Legislator -->Legislation that benefits Client]

Of course the Client and Legislator do not want to expose their direct ties, so they take a surreptitious route. We know from social network analysis, that the more social distance between two individuals the harder it is to show relation/influence between the two.

Social distance is often measured in the number of steps between two individuals. In this simple network: A-->B-->C, A and B and B and C are 1 step apart, while A and C are two steps apart. Based on social network research on intermediaries and "network horizons" we know that anyone separated by more than 3 steps are usually not known, nor influenced by each other. Plausible deniability increases with perceived distance. In the indirect quid-pro-quo, the client is more than 3 steps from the legislation they seek to influence.

We also saw longer loops that created even more perceived distance between the influencer and the target of influence. In these cases the Spouse node was replaced by a two node relationship where the spouse or other family/friend of the Legislator was a key player in an organization that benefited from the flow of money/influence in the Loop.

Be careful of those who deceive via perceived distance.