شهروندان و مسئول کنترل سیاست
Abstract
1- The model
2- The effect of uncertainty over policy: equilibrium policy
3- Uncertainty over policy: lobbying
4- Results
5- Concluding remarks
References
Citizens are often uncertain about the policies candidates will implement once elected (Baker et al., 2016). Indeed, it is common for politicians to deviate from their electoral platform. This work shows how this uncertainty affects electoral outcomes and policies when voters are risk averse. In particular, voters select candidates who carry out policies which can be very different, in expected terms, from the ones adopted when there is no uncertainty. These results can be better understood by looking at an important source of uncertainty over policy: the influence of lobbies on elected politicians. Large parts of electoral campaigns are devoted to either showing that a candidate cannot be trusted due to the controlling influence of special interests, or on the contrary, that a candidate can be trusted because she will not pander to lobbies. For example, during the 2016 US Presidential campaign the New York Times Editorial Board warned Hillary Clinton that her level of trustworthiness among voters was weak, when dealing with the Wall Street lobby. The debate at hand hinges on an inherent uncertainty faced by voters. While candidates often promise that their concerns are driven solely by policy, it is difficult to predict how they will react to offers made by special interest groups once in office. Indeed, citizens often express disappointment in their elected representatives’ decisions precisely on issues affected by lobbying. For example, a recent poll by CBS News/New York Times documented that 59% of Americans felt angry and disappointed by the results of a Senate vote which struck down a bipartisan measure for expanding background checks on gun owners, a topic that was subject to extensive lobbying by the National Rifle Association. Republican (86%), Democratic (95%) and Independent (83%) voters all favored this policy. Moreover, multiple polls conducted by Gallup show that, when American voters are asked whether they think their congressional representatives focus on the needs of special interest groups or the needs of their constituents, half of the respondents answer special interests. This range of responses suggests that elected politicians vary in their behavior with special interest groups or that some voters are not well informed about the linkages between their representatives and lobbies. Theories that investigate lobbying under uncertainty typically assess cases of special interest groups acting before the elections by providing candidates with campaign contributions. Much of that work focuses on the informational content that lobbying can provide to voters because special interest groups are assumed to be more informed than voters with regards to candidates’ skills. This paper takes a new approach, analyzing instead a model of lobbying in which rational voters are uncertain about the willingness of a candidate to trade policy for favors from lobbies, if elected. This theory allows for an examination of how uncertainty on the responsiveness to lobbying – which, in reality, is widespread – shapes the impact of special interest groups on policy. I outline a model of lobbying with risk-averse citizens whose preferences are distributed on a unidimensional policy space. Voters cast their vote and elect a politician from the pool of citizens who receives, in turn, a contribution proposal from a lobby, in exchange for a policy more in line with the lobby’s preferences. There is uncertainty with regard to two types of citizens: saints and merchants. Saints do not value contributions from lobbies if elected. Therefore they do not pander to the interests of lobbies and simply implement their preferred policy. Merchants, instead, positively value these donations and, if elected, implement a policy which is a compromise between their preferred policy and the lobby’s preferred policy.