There currently exists a huge literature on campaign contributions and spending in legislative elections; and there likewise exists a substantial literature on lobbying activities given an elected legislature. Most of this work is empirical and descriptive, but there is a growing theoretical literature that attempts to provide more general explanations for the empirical findings. For the most part, this theoretical work has treated the giving of campaign contributions and lobbying as the same activity, yet a main theme in the descriptive accounts is that contributions are made to secure access to the recipient in order to lobby, conditional on the recipient being electorally successful. The current investigation develops a theory that explicitly integrates both campaign contributions and lobbying, considered in informational terms. The essential idea is that lobbying is predominantly an informational activity. Legislators have to make decisions on issues about which they often know relatively little. Interest groups, however, are frequently well-informed about the consequences of particular legislation for their particular interests; consequently, legislators would like to become informed by listening to lobbyists. Unfortunately, interest groups have little incentive to say anything about an issue that might hurt their cause, and so there is a non trivial problem for the legislator in disentangling useful information from the case any lobbyist might present. In view of this, some lobbyists are likely to be more informative than others for a given legislator. This could be because some lobbyists' interests are more closely allied with those of the legislator and so can be expected to offer information on which lobbyists are likely to be more valuable to the legislator; in general, one expects that interest groups that have most to gain from being able to talk to a legislator and make their case on an issue will be those that are willing to give the most in contributions. Thus higher contributions might signal to a legislator which groups are likely to prove most important for that legislator during the legislative session. Important issues for the research are: (1) identification of the circumstances in which we can expect the informational role of contributions to be more important than the purely reelection role; (2) description of the extent to which the access role of contributions leads to "bias" in legislative decision making as a whole; and, (3) exploration of how details of the legislative decision making process affect the incentives for donors and recipients.
