Informational Lobbying and Legislative Voting

I analyze a model of interest group influence on legislative voting through information transmission. The model shows how interest groups may craft different messages to target different winning coalitions in order to influence the outcome. If access to legislators is costly then interest groups prefer to coordinate with allied legislators by providing them with information that helps them to persuade less sympathetic legislators. The model reconciles informational theories of lobbying with empirical evidence suggesting that interest groups predominantly lobby those who already agree with them. The model also makes new predictions about the welfare effects of interest group influence: from an ex ante perspective, informational lobbying negatively effects the welfare of legislators. The results highlight the need for more theories of persuasion that take collective choice institutions into account. Words in text: 7916 Words in headers: 58 Words outside text (captions, etc.): 774 Number of math inlines: 402 Number of math displayed: 22 Total: 7916+58+774+402+22 = 9172 ∗Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Kentucky. Contact: [email protected]. The author would like to thank John Patty, Maggie Penn, William Minozzi, Randy Calvert, Justin Fox, Ian Turner, Michael Nelson, and seminar participants at Université du Québec à Montréal, Yale University, and Washington University in St. Louis.