Informational Lobbying, Legislative Instructions and Campaign Contributions

信息游说、立法指示和竞选捐款

• 批准号: 9308303
• 负责人: David Austen-Smith
• 金额: $ 3.3万
• 依托单位: University of Rochester
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1993
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1993-07-01 至 1994-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9308303&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Informational; Lobbying; Legislative; Instructions; Campaign

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.

目前存在大量关于竞选捐款和立法选举支出的文献；同样存在大量关于选举产生的立法机构的游说活动的文献。这些工作大多是经验性的和描述性的，但越来越多的理论文献试图为经验性的发现提供更一般的解释。在很大程度上，这项理论工作将提供竞选捐款和游说视为同一活动，但描述性描述的一个主题是，捐款是为了确保能够接触到接受者，以便进行游说，条件是接受者在选举中取得成功。目前的调查发展了一种理论，明确地将竞选捐款和游说结合起来，从信息的角度考虑。其基本思想是，游说主要是一种信息活动。立法者必须就他们通常知之甚少的问题做出决定。然而，利益集团往往对特定立法对其特定利益的影响了如指掌；因此，立法者希望通过听取游说者的意见来了解情况。不幸的是，利益集团几乎没有动力就一个可能伤害他们事业的问题发表任何言论，因此，对于立法者来说，从任何游说者可能提出的案件中分离出有用的信息是一个不容忽视的问题。有鉴于此，对于特定的立法者，一些游说者可能比其他人提供更多的信息。这可能是因为一些游说者的利益与立法者的利益更密切相关，因此可以期望提供有关哪些游说者可能对立法者更有价值的信息；一般来说，人们预计，那些从能够与立法者交谈并就某一问题发表意见中获益最多的利益集团将是那些愿意提供最多捐款的利益集团。因此，较高的捐款可能向立法者发出信号，表明哪些群体在立法会议期间可能对该立法者最重要。该研究的重要问题是：(1)确定在哪些情况下，我们可以预期捐款的信息作用比纯粹的连任作用更重要；(2)描述捐款的获取作用在多大程度上导致立法决策中的“偏见”；(3)探讨立法决策过程的细节如何影响捐助者和受援者的激励。