Vote Buying: Legislatures and Lobbying

We examine the consequences of lobbying and vote buying, assuming this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two “lobbyists” compete for the votes of legislators by o¤ering up-front payments to the legislators in exchange for their votes. We analyze how the lobbyists’budget constraints and legislator preferences determine the winner and the payments. JEL classi…cation numbers: P16, C72 Keywords: vote buying, lobbying, legislatures, political economy. Dekel is at the Department of Economics, Tel Aviv University and Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA, email: [email protected]; Jackson is at the Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford California 94305, USA, and the Santa Fe Institute, http://www.hss.caltech.edu/ jacksonm/Jackson.html, email: [email protected] ; and Wolinsky is at the Department of Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA, email: [email protected] . Jackson gratefully acknowledges …nancial support from the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the NSF under grants SES9986190 and SES-0316493. Wolinsky gratefully acknowledges support from the Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies at Tel-Aviv University and the NSF under grants SES0452620. We are grateful to David Baron, Elchanan Ben Porath, Jon Eguia, Tim Feddersen, Sergiu Hart, Alessandro Lizzeri, Roger Myerson, Hugo Sonnenschein, and Balazs Szentes for helpful comments.