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Understanding influence in informational lobbying

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Abstract

What can interest group scholars, practitioners, and policymakers learn about the concept of influence from formal theories of informational lobbying? This article has two objectives. The first is to help clarify the fundamental components of informational lobbying models and to show where they differ from other lobbying mechanisms. To illustrate informational lobbying and influence attempts, I provide examples from a sample of 91 emails sent by interest groups to the permanent Dutch representative in the European Union. The second objective is to list common determinants of interest groups influence in informational lobbying models and illustrate when and why they are especially salient. This paper summarizes how the nature of communication and preferences shape interest group influence.

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Notes

  1. Wright (1996) and Ainsworth (2002) provide overviews of informational lobbying.

  2. Bauer et al. (1963) show that lobbyists acted as ‘service bureaus’ for allied legislators, which can be a form of relaxing legislators’ budget constraints.

  3. I thank Gleason Judd and a reviewer for this distinction. See also Blumenthal (2022) for a model in which interest groups provide subsidies to reduce the costs of policy-making.

  4. Stiglitz and Kosenko (2023a, 2023b) distinguishes between indirect and direct communication and reviews the theoretical literature.

  5. Alternatively, with legislative subsidies, interest groups with unlimited budgets can completely relax a legislator’s budget constraints so that they face no constraints in developing and implementing policies (Hall and Deardorff 2006).

  6. Interest groups are also constrained by their incentives to misrepresent. They face a commitment problem in revealing information. Such commitment problems may, however, also exist in models with quid-pro-quo lobbying, where interest groups may renege on their promises in rewarding certain proposals or votes.

  7. Schnakenberg and Turner (2023) provide more detail on the differences among formal theories of lobbying.

  8. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/data-protection/data-protection-regulation/ (accessed on February 14th, 2023).

  9. https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/lobby-tomie-documenten/.

  10. An alternative interpretation is that it was also a legislative subsidy. Documents are not solely provided to persuade the Dutch representative but also to make their life easier by providing texts in a clearly presented way. Thus, insofar as the information was meant to be directly copy-and-pasted, models of legislative subsidy are more applicable. If the goal was to change beliefs, informational lobbying models can help us more in understanding strategic behavior in how information is provided.

  11. For extensive reviews of game theoretic models of signaling and communication, see Banks (2013), Sobel (2013), and Gibbons et al. (2013).

  12. Although most informational lobbying models do not open the black box of the interest group-lobbyist interaction, some focus more on this aspect. For example, see Ellis and Groll (2022); Hirsch et al. (2023) and Hübert et al. (2023).

  13. Gibbons et al. (2013) review other models of informational influence.

  14. Although most study the canonical setting in which the sender is uninformed (Gentzkow and Kamenica 2011), others allow the sender to hold private information before designing experiments (Hedlund 2017).

  15. Austen-Smith and Wright (1994) allow for different costs of ‘auditing’ information and low costs imply that claims are easily verifiable.

  16. Sobel (2013), however, notes that not every formal model of communication exhibits the result that alignment makes communication easier.

  17. This logic requires that the legislature does not make decisions using unanimity rule and that legislators disagree sufficiently. That is, there must be sufficient heterogeneity among legislators.

  18. If communication occurs in public, then every policymaker necessarily has the same information and beliefs. But if communication is private, then they may have different beliefs about the state. The interest group can benefit from this by exploiting the fact that policymakers are uncertain about whether they are pivotal. That is, they do not know which ‘minimal winning coalition’ they are part of, and whether they are pivotal.

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  1. Department of Politics, Princeton University, 001 Fisher Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Emiel Awad

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Awad, E. Understanding influence in informational lobbying. Int Groups Adv 13, 1–19 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-023-00197-0

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