Friendly Lobbying under Time Pressure

Abstract

Lobbyists often target legislators who are aligned with them rather than opponents. The choice of whom to lobby affects both what information becomes available to legislators and how much influence special interest groups exert on policies. However, the conditions under which aligned legislators are targeted are not well understood. We investigate how the pressure to conclude policies quickly affects the strategic decision of whom to lobby. We derive conditions on the cost of delaying policies and on the distribution of legislators' preferences for lobbyists to prefer targeting allies. We show that the use of allied intermediaries has important implications for the duration of policymaking and the quality of policies. Counterintuitively, an increase in time pressure can increase the duration of policymaking and a longer duration does not always lead to better informed policies.

Informational Lobbying and Implementation Standards

“…It is meant to capture the inherent messiness of knowledge production and the difficulty of reaching definite conclusions about the effects of policies or products. It also differs from what is assumed in models in which IGs choose the precision of the signals they send to politicians (see recently in, e.g., Awad and Minaudier, 2022;Minaudier, 2022;Zerbini, 2022). 6 Whereas important parts of the analyses in these papers focus on the intensive margin of informational lobbying by IGs, i.e.…”

Persuasive Lobbying and the Value of Connections

“…vate verifiable information transmission (Caillaud and Tirole, 2007;Awad, 2020;Awad and Minaudier, 2022) the interest group can be better off by using allied intermediaries and withholding information from other legislators. These intermediaries observe hard information, can endorse the policy that they prefer, and then persuade their peers.…”

“…If lobbying is private, the interest group can target a legislator who is relatively easy to persuade (i.e., more friendly) but whose public endorsement can persuade a majority of legislator to support the policy. One constraint that the interest group faces in targeting a friendly legislator is their ability to persuade the median to adopt a reform that the interest group prefers (Awad, 2020;Awad and Minaudier, 2022). A new constraint arises within our model.…”

“…This is as opposed to political information, which is more relevant for distributional implications for policymakers in their districts, as in Dellis (2023) for example.8 The framework builds onLipnowski and Ravid (2020) in terms of interest group and legislators' preferences (p. 1641), and builds onAwad (2020) andAwad and Minaudier (2022) with similar information transmission technologies in legislative settings.…”

Understanding influence in informational lobbying

“…Models of informational lobbying give two main answers. First, interest groups may benefit because it allows them to use certain policymakers as intermediaries (Awad 2020;Awad and Minaudier 2022). Second, talking in private gives the interest groups more freedom in influencing the policymakers' beliefs, and subsequently, policy outcomes (Bardhi and Guo 2018;Chan et al 2019).…”