Lobbyists as Gatekeepers: Theory and Evidence
Abstract
Lobbyists are omnipresent in the policy-making process, but the value that they bring to both clients and politicians remains poorly understood. We develop a model in which a lobbyist's value derives from his ability to selectively screen which clients he brings to a politician, thereby earning the politician's trust and preferential treatment for his clients. Lobbyists face a dilemma, as their ability to screen also increases their value to special interests and the prices they can charge. A lobbyist's profit motive undermines his ability to solve this dilemma, but an interest in policy outcomes—due to either a political ideology or a personal connection—enhances it, which paradoxically increases his profits. Using a unique data set from reports mandated by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we find that lobbyists become more selective when they are more ideologically aligned with politicians, consistent with our prediction.
Additional Information
© 2023 Southern Political Science Association. We are thankful for suggestions and comments from Gleason Judd, Sergio Montero, and participants at the Lobbying and Institutional Performance Conference at Princeton and the Conference in Applied Methods for Political Science at the University of Rochester. The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication of this article. Replication files are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop). The empirical analysis has been successfully replicated by the JOP replication analyst. An appendix with supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1086/723026.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 121158
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- CaltechAUTHORS:20230425-441449400.5
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2023-04-27Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2023-04-27Created from EPrint's last_modified field