How Interest Groups with Limited Resources Can Influence Political Outcomes : Information Control and the Landless Peasant Movement in Brazil

In this paper we examine how an interest group with limited resources (votes and campaign contributions) nevertheless effectively influenced political policy through the control of information to general voters. Voters in turn lobbied politicians to take actions desired by the interest group. Our focus is on the Landless Peasants Movement (Movimento Sem-Terra) or MST and its success in invigorating land reform in Brazil. Although we direct attention to the MST, our analysis can be generalized to interest group behavior in other settings