Lobbying and elections : conference paper

In using their citizen candidate framework, Besley and Coate (2001) find that if citizen candidates with sufficiently extreme preferences are available, lobbying has no in fluence on equilibrium policy. I show that this result does not hold in a model with ideological parties instead of citizen candidates. Even if forward-looking voters are aware that lobbying will take place, their choice between policies is different when lobbies do and do not exist. In many cases, the majority of voters is better off with lobbying.