Voting Power in Weighted Voting Games: A Lobbying Approach by

We report experiments on the following lobbying game. Two lobbyists have identical budgets and simultaneously distribute them across voters in a legislature. Each voter votes for the lobbyist who pays them most and the lobbyist who receives most votes wins a prize. Taking the share of the budget distributed to a voter as a measure of the voter‟s voting power we investigate how voting power varies with voting weights. We focus on simple apex games where there is one „large‟ voter and several „small‟ voters and find that observed behavior is not perfectly in line with equilibrium predictions. However, we find support for two qualitative features of the equilibrium. First, the share of lobbyists‟ expenditures on the large voter exceeds her relative voting weight. Second lobbyists distribute their budgets over supermajorities.