The Role of Lobbyists: Entrepreneurs with Two Audiences

When fulfilling its linkage function, an interest group acts as a conduit between constituents and government officials. To help maintain the group's raison d' etre, a lobbyist, or interest group entrepreneur (IGE), must interact successfully with two distinct sets of individuals: members (and potential members) of the associated group and government officials. An IGE's overall success depends on his or her success with each of these distinct sets of individuals. In this paper, we develop a participation model to analyze how lobbyists work within this linkage framework and, at the same time, maintain the membership of their interest groups. By emphasizing the lobbyist's informational roles, we provide a new (nonexchanged based) rationale for the emergence of lobbyists. We find that the existence of an IGE is not always necessary to convince the government to provide a public good favoring a particular group of constituents, but the presence of an IGE provides informational gains that may reduce the number of equilibria in the game and improve the efficiency of the interactions between governments and particular interests in society.