Lobbying for wealth redistribution by changing the social planner’s preferences
| Published date | 01 January 2014 |
| Author | Mingli Zheng |
| Date | 01 January 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629813488987 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Lobbying for wealth
redistribution by changing the
social planner’s preferences
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2014, Vol 26(1)79–92
©The Author(s) 2013
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DOI:10.1177/0951629813488987
jtp.sagepub.com
Mingli Zheng
Department of Economics, University of Macau, Macau, China
Abstract
Wealth redistribution in a society is related to the social planner’s beliefs about social justice.
In this paper, the social planner’s preferences are described by a Choquet integral, which is a
convex combination of a weighted utilitarian social welfare function and an egalitarian social wel-
fare function. By spending resources on lobbying, interest groups can change the social planner’s
preferences, by shifting the weights of the utilitarian part, or by shifting more or less weight to
the egalitarian part. We use a model of a two-player lobbying game and obtain the conditions for
a pure strategy Nash equilibrium of the game.
Keywords
Choquet integral; lobbying; preferences change; social justice; wealth distribution
1. Introduction
Interest group activities, such as lobbying, are sometimes considered an interest exchange
with a significant corrupting influence in politics. Some of the literature assumes the out-
come of interest group activities is determined by an exogenously given payoff function.
More recent studies on interest group activities use structural models of political pro-
cesses, such as campaign contributions, legislative bargaining, or information transfer
(see Grossman and Helpman, 2001).
In this paper, we consider interest groups’ lobbying activities aimed at wealth redis-
tribution. Many laws and government policies have explicit or implicit redistributive
consequences. In addition to economic efficiency, the social planner takes social justice
into account during the decision-making process. The redistribution decisions need to be
fair and just from the social planner’s perspective. Although much lobbying in practice is
more or less legalized bribery, such as lobbyists purchasing legislative favors by offering
campaign contributions, lobbying by changing the social planner’s sense of distributive
Corresponding author:
Mingli Zheng, Department of Economics, University of Macau, Macau, China.
Email: mlzheng@umac.mo
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