Legislative lobbying under political uncertainty

Abstract

In this paper we develop a duopolistic model of legislative lobbying. Two lobbies compete to influence the votes of a group of legislators who have a concern for both social welfare and campaign contributions. The type of a legislator is the relative weight he/she places on social welfare as compared to money. We study the equilibria of this lobbying game under political certainty and uncertainty and examine the circumstances under which the policy is socially efficient, and the amount of money that has been invested in the political process. Special attention is paid to three primitives of the environment: the intensity of the competition between the lobbies, the internal organisation of the legislature and the proportion of bad and good legislators in the political area