City Research Online

Abstract

The inflow of money into politics and the influence of interest groups on policies are well-documented, but the monetary value of accessing policymakers is less wellunderstood. As a result, it is unclear what inferences researchers can draw from lobbying expenditures about interest groups’ strategies and their ideological alignment with policymakers. We study a model of informational lobbying with a collective decisionmaking body and endogenous reforms to investigate the determinants of the value of access. We show that the funds flowing to a given policymaker depend not only on this policymaker’s ideology and procedural power, but also on the overall distribution of preferences and power among other policymakers. Two policymakers with the same ideology and procedural power might therefore attract different amounts of contributions, depending on the preferences of fellow policymakers. Our results help clarify empirical research linking lobbying expenditures by interest groups to politicians’ ideologies and power.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). American Journal of Political Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Midwest Political Science Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Lobbying, Access, Special interest groups, Campaign contributions, Persuasion, Strategic Information Transmission
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Economics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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