Informational Lobbying, Legislative Instructions and Campaign Contributions

目前有大量关于竞选捐款的文献 在立法选举中的支出;同样存在一个 关于选举产生的游说活动的大量文献 立法机关 大部分工作都是经验性和描述性的，但 有越来越多的理论文献试图提供 对实证结果的更一般性解释。 在大多 第二部分，论述了运动的给予 捐款和游说是同一活动，但一个主要主题 在描述性账户中， 安全访问收件人，以游说，条件是 候选人在选举中取得成功。 当前 研究发展了一种明确地将两者结合起来的理论 竞选捐款和游说，考虑到信息 届 基本的想法是，游说主要是一种 信息活动。 立法者必须做出决定， 他们对这些问题往往知之甚少。 兴趣 然而，这些群体往往对 特定立法对其特定 利益;因此，立法者希望了解 通过听说客的话 不幸的是，利益集团 没有什么动机去谈论一个可能伤害 他们的原因，所以有一个不平凡的问题， 立法者在从案件中提取有用信息时， 说客可能会出现。 有鉴于此，一些游说者可能会 对某个立法者来说比其他人的信息量更大。 这 可能是因为一些游说者的利益更紧密地联系在一起 与立法者的那些，所以可以预期提供 关于哪些游说者可能更有价值， 立法者;一般来说，人们希望利益集团， 能够与立法者交谈， 他们在一个问题上的情况将是那些愿意给予 大部分是捐款。 因此，更高的捐款可能表明， 一个立法者，哪些团体可能被证明是最重要的， 在立法会议期间，立法者。 研究的重要问题是：（1）识别 在这种情况下，我们可以期待信息的作用， 贡献比纯粹的连任角色更重要; (2)的访问作用的程度的描述 捐款导致立法决策中的“偏见”， （3）探讨立法的具体内容。 决策过程影响对捐助者的激励， 受惠人士

There currently exists a huge literature on campaign contributions and spending in legislative elections; and there likewise exists a substantial literature on lobbying activities given an elected legislature. Most of this work is empirical and descriptive, but there is a growing theoretical literature that attempts to provide more general explanations for the empirical findings. For the most part, this theoretical work has treated the giving of campaign contributions and lobbying as the same activity, yet a main theme in the descriptive accounts is that contributions are made to secure access to the recipient in order to lobby, conditional on the recipient being electorally successful. The current investigation develops a theory that explicitly integrates both campaign contributions and lobbying, considered in informational terms. The essential idea is that lobbying is predominantly an informational activity. Legislators have to make decisions on issues about which they often know relatively little. Interest groups, however, are frequently well-informed about the consequences of particular legislation for their particular interests; consequently, legislators would like to become informed by listening to lobbyists. Unfortunately, interest groups have little incentive to say anything about an issue that might hurt their cause, and so there is a non trivial problem for the legislator in disentangling useful information from the case any lobbyist might present. In view of this, some lobbyists are likely to be more informative than others for a given legislator. This could be because some lobbyists' interests are more closely allied with those of the legislator and so can be expected to offer information on which lobbyists are likely to be more valuable to the legislator; in general, one expects that interest groups that have most to gain from being able to talk to a legislator and make their case on an issue will be those that are willing to give the most in contributions. Thus higher contributions might signal to a legislator which groups are likely to prove most important for that legislator during the legislative session. Important issues for the research are: (1) identification of the circumstances in which we can expect the informational role of contributions to be more important than the purely reelection role; (2) description of the extent to which the access role of contributions leads to "bias" in legislative decision making as a whole; and, (3) exploration of how details of the legislative decision making process affect the incentives for donors and recipients.