The Pluralistic View of Politics: Asymmetric Lobbyists, Ideological Uncertainty and Political Entry

In a spatial common agency model, two asymmetric interest groups (principals) in‡uence a unique decision-maker (agent). The decision-maker chooses a onedimensional policy on behalf of those principals and has private information about his ideology after contracting with principals. The policy is always e¢ cient and re‡ects a weighted average between the principals’ and the agent’s ideal points. The decisionmaker’s expected rent can be fully extracted by congruent interest groups but not when interest groups’objectives are too con‡icting. The degree of congruence is endogenous. It depends on the level of ideological uncertainty, whether interest groups can easily buy in‡uence or not, and on their relative ideological distance with the principal. In particular, the game of in‡uence is biased towards the closest principal. This suggests that free-entry equilibria of a lobbying game may only re‡ect the full diversity of the lobbying groups’ preferences when there is enough ideological uncertainty and when those groups are close to be equally distant to the decision-maker. Keywords: Lobbying, Common Agency, Ideological Uncertainty, Pluralistic Politics. JEL Classi…cation: D72; D82.