Persuasive Lobbying and the Value of Connections

The inflow of special interest money into politics and its influence on policies are well-documented. Less well-understood is why different policymakers attract different amounts of funds. To investigate the value to special interest groups of having access to a policymaker, we propose a model of informational lobbying with a collective decision-making body and endogenous reforms. We show that the value of private access to policymakers not only depends on their ideological alignment with the interest group, but also on their ideological alignment with the legislature's median and the agenda setter. The value of access to a given policymaker therefore depends not only on this policymaker's characteristics, but on the overall distribution of preferences and bargaining power in the legislature. Finally, we show that an agenda setter derives additional value because the interest group cannot commit not to share information publicly once a policy is proposed.