Understanding Political Lobbying: Careers in Professional Representation and the Juggling Act Between Multiple Ties

Recent strides in data availability and causal identification have boosted progress in the empirical study of lobbying. Arguably, empirical approaches have thus gotten out ahead of theory, which has developed less in past decades. Our book seeks to attend to this imbalance, developing a theory of lobbying that pays close attention to how individual lobbyists, acting as professional, hired representatives, navigate multiple relationships with their employers and policymakers in several political venues. In this conference paper, we discuss how models of representation help understand the promises and pitfalls of the lobbying profession. Moreover, we present our model of lobbying based on the strength of different relationships, which a lobbyist fosters to constituents and target audiences. Based on this model, the paper fleshes out which tradeoffs arise for the role as a representative, when the lobbyist tries to meet different, at times conflicting, expectations. Finally, we distill our main conclusions when it comes to explaining loyalty or defection from the represented interests and reflect on how these individual relationships aggregate in political systems in representative democracies, as well as non-democratic contexts.