Persuading policy-makers
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819875512 |
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
| Author | Christian Salas |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2019, Vol.31(4) 507–542
ÓThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819875512
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Persuading policy-makers
Christian Salas
YaleUniversity, USA
Abstract
Interest groups persuade policy-makers by publicly providing information about policies—for
example, through commissioning scientific studies or piloting programs—or about constituents’
views—for example, through opinion polls or organizing manifestations. By understanding these
public lobbying activities as public signals whoseinformational content can be strategically manipu-
lated, this paper studies the strategic use of these tools in order to persuade a policy-maker. A
game between a policy-orientedinterest group who can design a public signal and a self-interested
executive who can implement a policy is used to analyze the equilibrium public signal and policy,
the underlying persuasion mechanism, and the consequences for voters. This paper finds that,
even when an interest group always wants the same policy regardless of the state of the world,
voters can sometimes benefit from the group’s activity. Furthermore, voters may be best served
by a worse (less able or more cynical) policy-maker. This is because a-priori aworse policy-maker
will tend to herd on the prior relatively more than a better policy-maker; this will force interest
groups to release greater amounts of information in order to change the policy-maker’s mind,
which increases the probability that the voters’ best policy is implemented. Ideologically biased
policy-makers are not totally undesirable either, for they induce similar incentives to interest
groups of opposite ideology.
Keywords
Accountability; Bayesian persuasion; lobbying
1. Introduction
On July 5 2017, Greenpeace released the results of a study which showed that wind
energy and solar power will be the cheapest form of power generation in every G20
Corresponding author:
Christian Salas, Departmentof Political Science, Yale University, 115 ProspectStreet, Room 436, New Haven,
Connecticut 06511, USA.
Email: chsalas@gmail.com
country by the year 2030. Producing studies that publicly inform about a policy is a
common tactic used by Greenpeace and other pressure groups to persuade policy-
makers. This study, however, was not conducted by Greenpeace, it was commis-
sioned by them to six researchers at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology,
Finland.
1
This seems to be a growing trend: while 19 of 21 studies released before
2013 were conducted directly by Greenpeace, in the past five years 7 of 17 were
commissioned to an independent entity.
There are many other ways of attempting to persuade policy-makers through
the provision of public information, a notable example is mass protests. Unlike
commissioned studies which provide information about the policy, public protests
provide information about constituents’ preferences (Lohmann, 1993). Like com-
missioned studies, however, organizing public manifestations entails a risk, for the
resultant information is outside of the control of those initiating the public inter-
vention. Other examples of public information persuasion include opinion polls on
specific issues or the piloting of policy interventions.
These tactics have three important features. First, persuader, policy-maker and
the general public share a common ignorance regarding an aspect relevant for pol-
icy-making. Second, specially for protests and government pilot studies and less so
for opinion polls, once the information is produced it is made public without the
persuader being able to modify it.
2
Third, the initiating party, while not being able
to manipulate the final result, has some room to design the production technology
of such information. For example, in recent student protests in Latin America orga-
nizers voiced concerns with including concerts in the route of the manifestation
because the press would hold these activities, rather than support for the cause,
responsible for the turnout. Factors such as the timeof the day and day of the week
are usually considered by protest organizers as well, not only in how they promote
turnout but to calculate how this turnout will be interpreted by their audience of
interest. On the other hand, the range of possible results that a pilot intervention, a
scientific study or an opinion poll can produce depends crucially on the site and
time they are carried out, and thus again not only the result canbe manipulated but
the way the result will be interpreted in light of the prior expectation held by the
audience.
This paper interprets a public lobbying activity such as the ones described above
as the strategic design of a public signal, and in doing so analyzes the equilibrium
intervention and policy consequence. It will do so by formalizing the interaction
between a policy-maker (to whom I reserve the pronoun ‘he’) deciding whether to
implement a policy, and a special interest group (SIG, to whom I reserve the pro-
noun ‘she’) who wishes it to be implemented. The game has three stages: first, the
SIG chooses the design of the public signal, that is, how the outcome of the study
or protest will change the public’s belief about the suitability of the policy; second,
the policy-maker chooses a policy; and finally, the public updates its beliefs about
the policy-maker’s ability. Before making his choice, the policy-maker receives pri-
vate information about the state, information whose quality depends on his ability.
If the executive follows his signal, his action informs the public about his ability,
which drives the updating of beliefs.
508 Journal of Theoretical Politics 31(4)
Underlying the ideas of this paper is the fact that competitive elections create a
relationship of formal accountability between policy-makers and their constituents.
While policy-makers often have a genuine desire to maximize voters’ welfare, they
sometimes hold interests of their own, may those be policy preferences or the desire
to hold office for its own sake. A vast literature in economics and political science
has modeled the incumbent policy-maker’s problem as a career concerns one
(Holmstro
¨m, 1999; Levy, 2004), where incumbents take actions to signal to voters
their ability to execute policies or their congruence with voters’ preferences
(Ashworth, 2005; Canes-Wrone et al., 2001; Fearon, 1999; Maskin and Tirole,
2004).
3
In this paper, the focus is on the voters’ uncertainty regarding the policy-
maker’s ability.
It is important to distinguish persuasion of policy-makers through the design
public signals from lobbying activities from experts. Experts’ lobbying is character-
ized by the fact that SIGs possess private information about the state of the
world—that is, have expertise or the resources to acquire it. Persuasion in this con-
text is formalized as costly signaling or cheap talk (Austen-Smith and Banks, 2002;
Austen-Smith and Wright, 1994; Boehmke et al., 2006; Grossman and Helpman,
2001; Hirsch and Montagnes, 2015; Persson and Tabellini, 2000; Schnakenberg,
2017). In the cases studied in this paper, SIG, policy-maker and the public who
evaluates the policy-maker’s fitness for office have symmetric (lack of) informa-
tion: no one observes the state of the world and a-priori all share the same prior
belief.
A general persuasion problem under symmetric information where the actor
who has no decision power can nevertheless design a public signal has been general-
ized by Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011), (henceforth, KG) and this paper draws on
their construction.
4
In particular, this paper is interested in the case where the recei-
ver who has the decision-making power receives private information, independent
of the information provided by the public signal. This case is interesting because
the political economy literature has modeled the quality (high knowledge and good
judgement) of a policy-maker as the quality of the private signal he receives. This
case was briefly discussed in extension VI.A. of KG, and the optimal information
disclosure strategy was fully developed by Kolotilin (2018). This paper will present
a special case of this situation in order to study how the optimal public signal and
the voter’s welfare changes when the policy-maker’s payoff differs from that of a
voter who wishes to match the policy to the state of the world.
Notice that the SIG releases information about the policy, not the policy-mak-
er’s ability. The way in which the SIG manipulates the policy-maker is through
changing the informational environment he faces when making a decision; antici-
pating the policy-maker’s induced preferences as a function of beliefs, the SIG can
indirectly induce the policy-maker’s action. Studying a variety of policy-maker’s
preferences sheds light on the ability (or lack thereof) that the SIG has to manipu-
late him, and on the consequences of this persuasion relation on voters’ welfare.
Among other factors, this paper will show that despite the fact that the SIGs have
extreme policy preferences, in most circumstances the ability to design public sig-
nals will improve voters’ welfare. This is true, for example, when the policy-maker
Salas 509
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