Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/202823 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 12477
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Many decisions taken in legislatures or committees are subject to lobbying efforts. A seminal contribution to the literature on vote-buying is the legislative lobbying model pioneered by Groseclose and Snyder (1996), which predicts that lobbies will optimally form supermajorities in many cases. Providing the first empirical assessment of this prominent model, we test its central predictions in the laboratory. While the model assumes sequential moves, we relax this assumption in additional treatments with simultaneous moves. We find that lobbies buy supermajorities as predicted by the theory. Our results also provide supporting evidence for most comparative statics predictions of the legislative lobbying model with respect to lobbies' willingness to pay and legislators' preferences. Most of these results carry over to the simultaneous-move set-up but the predictive power of the model declines.
Subjects: 
legislative lobbying
vote-buying
Colonel Blotto
multi-battlefield contests
experimental political economy
JEL: 
C92
D72
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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