Informational Lobbying and Political Contributions

By Morten Bennedsen, Sven E. Feldmann. 2006

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Interest groups can potentially influence political decision-makers by offering contributions and by providing relevant information that sways the decision in the group's favor. What mix of these two instruments should an interest group choose, and how does the use of one instrument affect the effectiveness of the other? In this paper we identify an information externality that raises the cost of offering contributions and show that this indirect search cost reduces the group's incentive to gather information when contributions are allowed. Furthermore, we analyze how competition among lobby groups as providers of information and contributions affect the choice and effectiveness of the instruments. We show that the information externality rewards the group that can abstain from information search and focus its influence on contributions.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae4e1cfa6a87654673ab6c31c114018242f9deb0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Lobbying, corruption and political influence (2007, unknown): “the theoretical literature: two exceptions are Bennedsen and Feldmann (2005) and Dahm and”
Do Interest Groups Affect U.S. Immigration Policy? (2008, background): “For recent theoretical models of informational lobbying, see Bennedsen and Feldman (2006), Dahm and Porteiro (2004) and Lohmann (1995).”