Learning by lobbying

The forthcoming article “Learning by lobbying” by Emiel Awad, Gleason Judd, and Nicolás Riquelme is summarized by the author(s) below.

Interest groups can lobby more effectively if they understand politicians’ preferences, but public statements and voting records don’t always reveal their true positions. What’s less recognized is that lobbying itself can help reveal that information—and this creates strategic dynamics that shape how political relationships evolve over time. We develop a game-theoretic model to analyze how interest groups learn about politicians through lobbying interactions and how this can shape political influence and lobbying relationships over time.

In our model, an interest group is unsure about whether a politician is truly an ally or adversary on a specific issue. This creates strategic tensions on both sides. The group, through carefully designed lobbying offers—menus of policy-transfer packages that combine proposed policy changes with various levels of political support—balances immediate policy gains against long-term learning. Sometimes they provide less-aggressive or overly-generous terms now to better learn a politician’s type, enabling more effective lobbying later. Politicians, recognizing that their responses reveal information, engage in reputation management—even allies may strategically act more adversarial to extract better future terms.

Our analysis reveals several key patterns. Early-career politicians receive more diverse lobbying overtures as groups probe their preferences, while veterans face more targeted and homogeneous strategies. Politicians with secure positions—e.g., those with safe constituencies—often receive surprisingly generous early-career lobbying offers because their stronger reputational incentives force groups to “pay more” for effective screening. More generally, dynamics are shaped by reputational considerations of both groups and politicians: forward-looking interest groups invest more in learning relationships, while patient politicians are more inclined to conceal their true preferences.

These insights shed new light on important empirical patterns: why allies often receive especially favorable treatment, why lobbying relationships evolve systematically rather than randomly, and why newcomers attract intense but varied lobbying efforts. Our learning-by-lobbying mechanism predicts that early-career politicians should exhibit greater policy variance than veterans—not because their preferences change, but because uncertainty about those preferences generates different strategic responses.

Extensions show how institutional features shape these dynamics. Politicians with stronger reputational incentives make learning more expensive, reducing the value of early access. Revolving-door opportunities can facilitate learning by reducing politicians’ incentives to misrepresent preferences. Institutional constraints like voting rules and veto players diminish the value of learning since there’s less policy space to exploit.

Our findings provide new insights into lobbying oriented around information and relationship-building, not just transactional exchanges. This mechanism helps explain the career-long evolution of political influence and suggests that as newcomers increasingly enter office without extensive track records, strategic learning through lobbying becomes ever more central to how policy gets made.

In essence, lobbying isn’t just about winning today’s policy fights—it’s also about using today’s interactions as investments to win tomorrow’s more efficiently.

About the Author(s): Emiel Awad is a political economist at Oxera Consulting LLP in Amsterdam, Gleason Judd is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Nicolás Riquelme is an Assistant Professor in the School of Business and Economics at Universidad de los Andes, Chile and the Director of the Master in Economics. Their research “Learning by lobbying” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.