Group Talk

Persuading political adversaries is hard. Policymakers distrust interest groups with divergent agendas, and yet organized interests can sometimes persuade distrustful policymakers despite the lack of technologies for verifiable signaling. How? In this article, we propose that talking as a group can allow for credible cheap talk where uncoordinate communication by individuals would fail. Prior work treat lobbying organizations as unitary actors with unlimited discretion and credible in-formation transmission is possible between approximate allies. We adopt the view that lobbying organization is a mechanism that aggregates the expressed views of its members. Through carefully selecting internal rules of decision and if it is of sufficient size, lobbying organizations can credibly persuade policymakers even when disagreement is large.