Lobbying, Political Uncertainty and Policy Outcomes

This book analyses interest group communication strategies in parliamentary political systems, and considers how political uncertainty, which emerges from the political process, shapes interest group communication strategies. It develops a formal model of lobbying in a bicameral legislature with strong party discipline, and discusses why interest groups choose public or private communication channels to influence political bargaining. The book tests its hypothesis in different policy contexts, including lobbying on major legislation in the field of labour and social policy.

Develops a new model of lobbying which can be applied in a non-US context, to European democracies with parliamentary systems Provides a clean way to test specific mechanisms which help explain interest group communication strategies in parliamentary political systems Addresses the schism between game theoretic approaches to the study of informational lobbying and empirical studies on lobbying

Autorentext
Sebastian Koehler is a research fellow at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany. His current research focuses on interest group access to political decision-makers and on the role which interest groups play in legislative bargaining.

Klappentext
Despite much recent research, our understanding of interest groups' choice of strategy when trying to influence public policy is still limited. Combining a novel game-theoretic argument with a convincing empirical test, the present volume goes a long way in improving this state of the art. I thus highly recommend it to all researchers interested in lobbying and interest groups. Andreas Dür, University of Salzburg, Austria
This book analyses interest group communication strategies in parliamentary political systems, and considers how political uncertainty, which emerges from the political process, shapes interest group communication strategies. It develops a formal model of lobbying in a bicameral legislature with strong party discipline, and discusses why interest groups choose public or private communication channels to influence political bargaining. The book tests it hypothesis in different policy contexts, including lobbying on major legislation in the field of labour and social policy. Sebastian Koehler is a research fellow at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Germany. His current research focuses on interest group access to political decision-makers and on the role which interest groups play in legislative bargaining.

Inhalt
1 Introduction.- 2 Fundamental Uncertainty: The Demand for Information and Interest Group Activities.- 3 Process Uncertainty: Political Decision-making.- 4 Modeling Interest Group Communication Strategies.- 5 Data and Operationalization.- 6 Interest Group Communication Strategies.- 7 Conclusions.