You Win, I Lose: On the Spatial Interdependence of Lobbying Outcomes Within and Across Camps

Lobbying is essentially a competitive endeavour. Opposing lobbying camps favouring different policy outcomes employ their weight in an attempt to move policy outcomes in their preferred direction; like in a tug of war. The dynamics and effects of this interdependence between sides are, however, largely overlooked by present research. This paper formulates a theory on how the success of one lobbying camp is shaped by the successful lobbying endeavour of opposing camps – a competitive dynamic which can be conceptualized as a form of spatial interdependence. We use Bayesian spatial autogressive probit models on a dataset of lobbying on 50 issues in five European countries to estimate directly how successful lobbying by one side decreases the probability of the opposing side being successful. The results reveal important new dynamics about how interdependence between camps conditions their lobbying success. Our findings show 1) how various relative lobbying resources exert their weight on the lobbying success of the camp itself, 2) how these resources affect the opposing camp through counteractive lobbying, and 3) how these estimates change, when the competitiveness of lobbying dynamics are taken into account.