No staffer-only meetings, the representative must sit through it and must fulfill a quota of X office hours per month, set according to their schedule. Each person / group gets 15-20 minutes. The hours can be cancelled up to 24 hours before for emergencies but must be made up within a week. How does that sound?

I get a bit mad when people suggest that representatives don't have time for that. That's their job, damnit! Make time.

This would really cut down the power of nepotism / cronyism in lobbying and bring politicians back down to earth, closer to the people they represent. Everyone should have equal access to their representative.

15 minutes per issue for eight hours (no accounting for breaks or time between) would be 32 issues. Per week. Even 40 hours a week is 160 groups, which seems pretty small given the size of the US.

Lobbying and staffers exist because the time of our representatives is really limited. I think it's a really awful solution, but I'm not surprised that it exists.

To make things more time efficient, you could even say than more than 5 people, with a designated spokesperson, can group together to block out an hour of time instead of making the representative hear the same issue the 5th time, and they have the benefit of being able to explain one subject in depth in an undivided manner.

Today we have the most amazing transportation and telecommuting technology available to perform duties in D.C., along with staffers to help. If representatives still can't make time for their constituency, maybe we ought to rethink their work division and responsibilities. Otherwise we run the risk of having presidents who don't know the price of milk.

We don't have a government that produces representative policy outcomes for reasons of corruption and systemic flaws, like bad election mechanisms.

I think most people are not aware how commonplace this is.

Take Senator Ron Wyden’s son, Adam—directly upon graduation from his Columbia MBA program he started his own hedge fund, no doubt capitalizing on contacts he made interning at the $19-billion fund of one of his father’s supporters, David Shaw. “Not many college kids get to intern on a D.E. Shaw portfolio for the summer,” Brian Marshall, who once ran the fund, was quoted as saying in a 2011 Bloomberg article on the younger Wyden.

It might be a stretch here, but I think this is quite related to Piketty's groundbreaking book on capital -- this is the nature of the beast, wealth remains in the family through connections, and this is just one of the ways how it happens.

We all know how many people get jobs because of connections... the privileged among us just take it for granted -- indeed because it so unremarkable we often just forget how we got there or don't think much of it (I'll confess that I initially got a well-paying job (that I was entirely unqualified for) purely because of family connections). Just think how many of these backroom "hey instead of paying me $2000 for my campaign, hire my daughter who's having trouble finding employment" dealings there are that go unreported and are never found out. I'd say it absolutely is commonplace.

No, I don't think we all know this. Most of the people I know did not get jobs through family connections. I suspect a trend analysis would show that the number of high-income workers who achieved their position through nepotism or some other form of non-achievement-based social connection is declining, not rising.

We're social animals, and "connections" will always be valuable. I don't see any evidence that D.E. Shaw treated Wyden's son differently because they wanted something out of his father.

Seriously though, after working at a prestigious institution and seeing how often lunch and dinner conversations between peers involved talk of how "my daughter can work in your group!" and "your son can work in my group!", my intuition tells me this is just the way it is - nepotism is pretty much everywhere. Sure, more anecdotes, but that's all I got until someone does some solid research on it.

For now here're two more articles, that may have some more information: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/3...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/07/in-prais...

There's no requirement that data must be exhaustive. And in most social science research, it never is (actually that is frequently the case in hard sciences, too).

While it is large in scope, this is mostly about how campaign funds are funneled to relatives, and doesn't appear to include favoritism in banking, lobbying, foundations, etc.

Congress is bought and our laws are bought.

Unfortunately sometimes citizens have to resort to the old-fashioned and not 100% accurate "judge for yourself, based on the partial information that is available, to figure out what the bigger picture is".

The people with the funds and power to connect all those dots are in the set of people who are somewhat likely to have benefitted from those connections. I don't see a big move to get that research funded any time soon.

Sure, that's a tactic that happens in lobbying, just as its a tactic that happens in people directly advocating their own views.

I am not saying that lobbying is free of corruption. But the reason the two often go together isn't that lobbying is fundamentally corruption, its that lobbying is an expensive form of petition, which makes its community of users overlap considerably with the set of people/groups with the resources to effectively engage in corruption independently of whether or not they were using an intermediary to do advocacy to public representatives.

Now that is hard to judge from the outside, but that is the real difference.

I suspect many people believe those in power now are mostly selling their vote for cash not making decisions based on the merit and just happening to side with those giving piles of cash because they heard those people give explanations of why favoring them was a good move for the country.

Which is also usually corruption and a violation of campaign finance laws which prohibit coordination between unlimited "independent" expenditures and candidates or campaign committees controlled by them.