Given how much policy-making is specific to particular industries, is there anything wrong with the players in those industries having a big say in policy? I'd

Given how much policy-making is specific to particular industries, is there anything wrong with the players in those industries having a big say in policy? I'd love to see what the "1,779 policy issues" that the study considered are, but I bet the average person doesn't have much to say about most of them. The goal is not to pit people against corporations. Those corporations are just the economic vehicles through which people act. Fishing companies are clearly going to have a lot to say about fishing policy, and are going to provide better input to Congress than I ever could, since I know nothing about fishing other than a few sound bites like "we're overfishing the seas". I don't know what that means for particularly fisheries or whatever other considerations there are. Take a more controversial example, banking. Most people don't know a thing about banking. They've heard sound bites about "greedy bankers" and "inefficient regulators", but they probably don't even know what fractional reserve banking is, let alone what the effects of regulation on it would be. How is it a bad thing that bankers have a large amount of input into these policies? And it hasn't stopped the government from passing policies that they oppose. Look at the animosity toward Dodd-Frank on Wall Street. Social scientific research can be twisted to support any conclusion. It's typically dressed up in the legitimacy of statistical analysis, but the underlying data is usually weak and their conclusions involve a lot of narrative-writing on the part of the authors. Also, you have to consider what the goal of democratic institutions is. Is it accountability or representation? Representation means that Congressmen would mirror the opinions of the public. Accountability means that the peoples role is to vote out bad leadership. Both are important, but I think accountability is typically the better goal.