The forthcoming article “Persuasion in veto bargaining” by Jenny S. Kim, Kyungmin Kim, and Richard Van Weelden is summarized by the author(s) below.
An underappreciated aspect of agenda-setting is the opportunity for the proposer to engage in persuasion to convince the veto player. While the importance of agenda-setting authority has long been recognized (Romer and Rosenthal 1978), agenda-setting is almost always associated with an opportunity to advocate in favor of the proposal. In this article we demonstrate control of the information process broadens the scope for the agenda setter to secure favorable policy outcomes.
Take as a leading example an interest group that both develops legislation and lobbies for its passage. We interpret policy development as the interest group using its resources and expertise to draft legislation and informative lobbying as information design to persuade a critical policymaker. In our analysis the interest group wants to move the policy in a particular direction, but the policymaker’s preferred policy depends on the unknown state of the world. For example, an industry lobbyist always wants to reduce regulation whereas the policymaker’s ideal policy depends on the regulation’s environmental effectiveness. We study how the ability to engage in informative lobbying shapes the legislation the interest group will develop and put forward.
We show that the interest group can achieve its maximal payoff by either providing no information or by revealing the outcome of a simple binary experiment. If the legislature always supports reducing regulation, the interest group would not reveal any information. This is because the proposed policy would make the critical legislator indifferent between the new policy and the status quo, meaning the policy is proportional to the expected environmental consequences. Informative lobbying cannot change the expectation on average, it only succeeds in creating uncertainty about the policy, which never benefits a (risk averse) interest group.
When the legislature is less aligned, and so in some cases may prefer to increase regulation, informative lobbying can be strictly beneficial. The key is that the interest group’s agenda-setting authority ensures that regulation won’t be increased. Consequently, by revealing whether the legislature’s ideal is on the opposite side of the status quo, the interest group can secure greater policy concessions in expectation.
Optimally, the interest group would commission a study that reveals only whether the environmental damages of deregulation would be very harmful. In a favorable legislative environment, the interest group would solicit the endorsement of a free-market think tank which supports deregulation except when the consequences would be catastrophic, but if the legislature is more skeptical it would solicit the endorsement of a more ideologically centrist one (e.g. American Enterprise Institute vs Brookings). So, even if it had unlimited control over the information available, the optimal experiment is to reveal a simple endorsement decision by an appropriately chosen expert.
Our analysis provides a first step in understanding how agenda setting and persuasion interact and shows that studies which do not incorporate persuasion fail to fully capture the scope of proposal power. Persuasion is particularly important when the proposer and veto player are misaligned and so, absent persuasion, the value of agenda-setting authority is muted.
About the Author(s): Jenny S. Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Emory University, Kyungmin Kim is a Professor of Economics at Emory University, and Richard Van Weelden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Their research “Persuasion in veto bargaining” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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