BACKGROUND Although public and media attention has focused on the federal role in the regulation of tobacco products, state government remains an important arena for changing tobacco control policies. Lobbying state officials by public health and the tobacco industry is a commonly used mechanism to influence public policy. METHODS Major bills of the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 Wisconsin legislati...

Grammatical Role Parallelism (Kamayama, 1986; Smyth, 1994) Reasoning/World Knowledge (Hobbs, 1979) a. George narrowly defeated John, and special interests promptly began lobbying him. [ him = George ] b. John was narrowly defeated by George, and special interests promptly began lobbying him. [ him = John ] c. George narrowly defeated John, and Mitt absolutely trounced him. [ him = John ] d. Geo...

Abstract There is an increasing involvement of lawyers and law firms in public affairs through activities that are aimed at influencing legislative regulatory developments. Law offer services which can be regarded as lobbying, yet, to the detriment transparent policy-making, they reluctant register European Union Transparency Register (EUTR) provide information about their activities. As growin...

The lobbying process is modelled as an auction with externalities in which lobbies bid to get implemented their most-preferred policy. Furthermore, the government may influence the lobbying process itself by biasing the auction among organized interests. We identify the following trade-off: competition yields a higher transfer to the government, but the outcome of the game tends to be less effi...

We propose various models for lobbying in a probabilistic environment, in which an actor (called “The Lobby”) seeks to influence the voters’ preferences of voting for or against multiple issues when the voters’ preferences are represented in terms of probabilities. In particular, we provide two evaluation criteria and three bribery methods to formally describe these models, and we consider the ...

This paper analyzes the conditions that lead to the political power position of business by developing a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies. Abandoning the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinants versus business’ political action, the model predicts under which conditions elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges to acco...

In the “Protection for Sale” model of Grossman and Helpman (1994), some industries are assumed to be able to overcome the free-rider problem and organize a lobby that represents their group interests while other industries are unable to form a lobby. This dichotomy presents a problem for the many papers that attempt to estimate the model empirically since every industry must be classified as ei...

In popular discussion much has been made recently of the susceptibility of government policies to lobbying by foreigners. The general presumption has also been that such interactions have a deleterious effect on the home economy. However, it can be argued that, in a trade policy context, bending policy in a direction that would suit foreigners may not in fact be harmful: If the policy outcome a...