Pressure Politics

A common mental model sees lobbies pushing policy in a certain direction from the status quo with a certain force, the outcome being a function of how hard lobbies push and in what direction, according to the `parallelogram of political forces' at work. When this model is formalized and lobbies are seen as playing a game in which they are attempting to maximize their payoffs, net of lobbying costs, the prediction is that lobbies seldom if ever will push in the direction of what they ideally want, for their lobbying will partly aim to offset the efforts of others, leading to waste of resource. There will often appear to be more conflict of interest between two lobbies than actually is the case. This calls into question methodologies for studying and for measuring power that assume that we can infer groups' preferences from their lobbying behaviour. From observing their behaviour we can infer things about their power if we know their preferences or we can infer things about their preferences if we know their power. But it is not possible to make both inferences.