Informational Lobbying and Agenda Distortion
本文挑战了信息型游说（无政治献金或证据扭曲）能改善政策制定的主流观点，证明它可能导致政策制定者优先处理次要议题，反而损害决策质量。
This article challenges the prevailing view that pure informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion or withholding) leads to better informed policymaking. In the absence of lobbying, the policymaker (PM) may prioritize more promising issues. Recognizing this, interest groups involved with other issues have a greater incentive to lobby in order to change the issues that the PM learns about and prioritizes. We show how informational lobbying can be detrimental, in the sense that it can lead to less informed PMs and worse policy. This is because informational lobbying can lead to the prioritization of less important issues with active lobbies, and can crowd out information collection by the PM on issues with more likely beneficial reforms. The analysis fully characterizes the set of detrimental lobbying equilibria under two alternative types of issue asymmetry.