Persuasive lobbying and the value of connections

Abstract The inflow of money into politics and the influence of interest groups on policies are well‐documented, but the monetary value of accessing policymakers is less well‐understood. As a result, it is unclear what inferences researchers can draw from lobbying expenditures about interest groups' strategies and their ideological alignment with policymakers. We study a model of informational lobbying with a collective decision‐making body and endogenous reforms to investigate the determinants of the value of access. We show that the funds flowing to a given policymaker depend not only on this policymaker's ideology and procedural power but also on the overall distribution of preferences and power among other policymakers. Two policymakers with the same ideology and procedural power might therefore attract different amounts of contributions, depending on the preferences of fellow policymakers. Our results help clarify empirical research linking lobbying expenditures by interest groups to politicians' ideologies and power.