City Research Online

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 policy making and the quality of policies. Counter-intuitively, an increase in time pressure can increase the duration of policy making and a longer duration does not always lead to better-informed policies.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and repro-duction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
Publisher Keywords:	Dynamic Lobbying, Friendly Lobbying, Persuasion, Strategic Information, Transmission
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > Economics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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