Access and Influence in Legislatures

Access is an important prerequisite for outside influence. One prominent form is targeted access that provides interest groups with chances to lobby certain politicians while they draft proposals. I study a game-theoretic model and show how such access, merely by increasing the possibility of that influence, can itself endogenously influence several behaviors. It raises everyone’s anticipation of lobbying, thereby affecting what pivotal legislators will pass and, in turn, proposals and lobbying expenditures. The magnitude of these endogenous effects varies with polarization, and their direction depends on the group’s extremism relative to its target. They can work in the group’s favor or against it, potentially even overwhelming the direct benefit of more lobbying opportunities. For example, moderate groups crave access to relatively extreme politicians but avoid access to a range of more centrist politicians. The results build our theoretical understanding of access and have implications for various political expenditures. ∗Princeton University. Lobbying is one of the main ways that interest groups try to influence policy, and one of the best ways to lobby is by shaping the content of bills as they are written in committee (Hall and Wayman, 1990; Powell, 2014). In order to do so, however, interest groups need typically access, which provides opportunities to engage and communicate with policymakers (Wright, 1996). Since politicians are busy with many other obligations and carefully allocate their scarce time, gaining access usually requires groups to develop relationships, or hire lobbyists with relationships, well ahead of time. What are the effects of those relationships? And which politicians do interest groups want to target? Since access is critical for outside influence, it is a central topic for scholars of interest groups. Like many other forms of outside influence, however, it is notoriously difficult to study. Two important obstacles are that (i) access is difficult to observe and measure (Miller, 2021a) and (ii) interest groups and politicians are highly strategic, often allowing multiple explanations to be consistent with observed data. One way to address these obstacles is by refining our theoretical understanding of access, which can suggest new avenues for indirect evidence and shed light on empirical findings. That is the goal of this paper. The main contribution of this paper is a theoretical analysis that isolates strategic effects of targeted access that provides chances to influence proposals. I show how such access can indirectly affect proposals and votes by other politicians who are not targeted, as well as lobbying expenditures by interest groups. I then study how an interest group’s desire to acquire access depends on (i) its own ideology, (ii) the target’s ideology and proposal power, as well as (iii) the proposal power of ideologically extreme politicians. The results complement existing theories of access, many of which consider an isolated target and thus See Miller (2021a) for an overview of recent work, which has shed light on how groups can acquire access (Kalla and Broockman, 2015; Fouirnaies and Hall, 2017; McCrain, 2018; Bertrand et al., 2014; Blanes i Vidal et al., 2012), which politicians they want to target (Powell and Grimmer, 2016; Fouirnaies, 2017; Miller, 2021b; Liu, 2021), and whether access facilitates influence (Ban and You, 2019). See, e.g., Powell and Grimmer (2016) or Kalla and Broockman (2015) for more discussion. As (Miller, 2021a, p. 297) notes while reviewing empirical studies of targeted access: “though the theoretical linkages between access and other quantities of interest are sometimes unclear, formal theory can help researchers elucidate expectations and guide empirical tests. ” For an exemplary empirical study of outside influence that incorporates strategic behavior, see Kang (2015).