The Sunshine Survey: Special Interests Have Too Much Influence In Government
And almost 70% want full disclosure of all campaign contributions and lobbying work.
Editor’s note: “Let The Sunshine In,” our ongoing project focusing on transparency, accountability and ethics in government and other civic institutions, commissioned Anthology Research to conduct what we hope will become a regular check-in on how Hawaii residents feel about important public issues.
Some 56% of Hawaii residents think that special interest groups have too much influence in state and county government.
Only 12% disagreed.
That’s according to a new survey from Anthology Research on behalf of Honolulu Civil Beat, which helped develop the questionnaire.
A total of 431 completed surveys were collected between May 22 and June 6. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.72%, meaning there is a 95% level of confidence in the results.
David Pettinger, senior partner with Anthology FINN Partners, characterized the results of the survey as obvious.
“A solid majority of residents feel that special interest groups do have too much influence,” he said. “They really want to see transparency as the No. 1 thing to address that influence.”
The survey comes at a time when officials at the federal, state and county level say they are paying closer attention to the outsize impact of campaign contributions in politics and governance.
There have been a number of high-profile bribery cases in Hawaii, including one that led to the imprisonment of a former state Senate majority leader and the Finance Committee vice chair of the state House.
Lawmakers have moved to enact new laws to rein in the power of lobbyists and strengthen campaign finance laws and ethics disclosures. But some of the more substantive proposals — such as setting up a comprehensive public financing of elections — have met resistance from incumbent legislators.
Recent news stories illustrate that a pay-to-play culture continues to thrive in the islands. The increased media scrutiny and indictments may be changing how residents view the situation.
For example, nearly seven in 10 residents — 69% — think that requiring full disclosure of all political donations and lobbying activities is something they would very strongly support.
And nearly that many — 63% — want to see stronger ethics laws an enforcement to prevent conflicts of interest.
“So that tells me that just having that visibility into what’s happening within government is something that’s very important to residents,” said Pettinger.
The more informed survey respondents tended to have stronger feelings on the topic of special interests.
Over 84% in the survey sample said they are registered to vote at their Hawaii address. About 13% said they were not registered while 2% were unsure of their voter status.
“Those who tend to be more likely to register to vote and more likely to be higher income households tended to be better engaged in these issues,” said Pettinger. “They had a much lower proportion of ‘don’t know’ responses.”
The survey highlights other demographic takeaways:
- A higher portion of Oahu residents (14%) does not feel special interests groups have too much influence compared to the neighbor islands. Just 2% of Hawaii County residents said no to this question.
- Older respondents age 50-64 (63%) and 65 years and older (66%) were statistically more likely to feel that special interest groups have too much influence compared to younger residents age 18-34 (41%).
- Those without a four-year or advanced degree (43%) were statistically more likely to answer “don’t know/not sure” compared to college graduates (20%).
There is also a significant segment of residents — 32% — who said they did not know or were unsure about the influence of special interests, suggesting that there is a sizable degree of uncertainty when it comes to the topic.
