Who Uses Commercial Lobbying Firms

Brittany Feor (), Blair Long () and Eric Richert

No 1409, Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University

Abstract: This paper explains the type of interest groups that use commercial lobbyists and the types of groups that lobby directly or are excluded from access to politicians. The main results provide evidence that commercial lobbying and donations by these firms to politicians can improve policy outcomes by increasing the number of groups that the politician can trust. Special interest groups come up with policy proposals that may be good or bad for society. They also get a benefit of having their idea implemented regardless of its overall social benefit so cannot be trusted to present their policy only when it is good for society. We show that repeated interaction with a policy maker can incentivize truthful communication. Therefore, interest groups working on highly salient issues or who work on issues with mostly high social benefits, can lobby alone, while interest groups who work on less salient issues or are less reputable need to use a commercial lobbyist to be trusted by the politician. Finally, firms of the lowest quality or salience are excluded from influencing the policy maker.

Keywords: Repeated Contracts; Commercial Lobbying; Political Access; Strategic Communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 H11 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/qed_wp_1409.pdf First version 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qed:wpaper:1409

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Babcock ().