Snyder (1991) - On Buying Legislatures
Abstract
This paper analyzes a simple spatial voting model that includes lobbyists who are able to buy votes on bills to change the status q u o . T h e key results a r e : (i) if lobbyists can discriminate across legislators when buying votes, then they will pay the largest bribes to legislators wh o a r e slightly opposed t o the proposed change, rather than t o legislators who strongly support o r strongly oppose the change; (ii) equilibrium policies exist, and with q u a d r a t i c preferences these equilibria always lie between t h e average of t h e lobbyists’ ideal points a n d the median of the legislators’ ideal points; a n d (iii) “moderate” lobbyists, whose positions on a policy issue a r e close t o the median of the legislators’ ideal points, will prefer the issue t o be salient, while more extreme lobbyists will generally prefer the issue t o be obscure.
Model
The model examines a policy space [math]x\in[-0.5,0.5][/math]. An infinitely sized legislature consists of individual legislators whose ideal points [math]z[/math] are distributed uniformly over [-0.5,0.5] ([math]z~U[-0.5,0.5][/math].
