Morten Bennedsen and Sven E. Feldmann
Additional contact information
Morten Bennedsen: Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Postal: Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3 C, 5. sal, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Sven E. Feldmann: University of Chicago
Abstract: We analyze informational lobbying in the context of multi-member legislatures.
We show that a single decision maker and a decentralized majoritarian legis-
lature provide widely di .erent incentives for interest groups to acquire and
transmit policy relevant information.
The paper also shows a di .erence in the opportunity to a .ect policy through
lobbying between a parliamentary legislature and a legislature with low voting
cohesion,such as the U.S.Congress.We show that the incentives to lobby a
parliamentary legislature are much lower than to lobby Congress.The results
provide a rationale for why lobby groups are more active n the U.S.Congress.
The key institutional feature to explain the di .erent behavior of lobby groups
is the vote of con .dence procedure,which creates voting cohesion in a parlia-
mentary system across policy issues.We show that the .exibility of creating
majorities in the Congress creates an incentive for interest groups to play an
active role in the design of policy in the congressional system,while the voting
cohesion in the parliamentary system dissuades interest group ’s incentive to
engage in information provision.
Keywords: Informational lobbying; legislatures; U.S. Congress
JEL-codes: H89
36 pages, June 1, 2000
Full text files
x648095346.pdf
Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Lars Nondal ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().
RePEc:hhs:cbsnow:2000_007This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:19:22.