Informational Lobbying and Competition for Access

There is substantial evidence that political contributions buy access to politicians. This pa-per incorporates access into a model of informational lobbying, then uses the access framework to analyze the impact of contribution limits on policy outcomes and representative citizen wel-fare. In the competition for access model, interest groups provide contributions to a politician and those that provide the highest contributions win access. A group with access can present verifiable evidence in favor of its preferred policy. Because equilibrium contributions are cho-sen endogenously, the politician learns about the evidence quality of all interest groups, even when he grants access to only some of the groups. A contribution limit reduces the amount of information available to the politician and tends to result in worse policy. Under a variety of assumptions, a limit has an unambiguously negative impact on representative citizen welfare. However, when the politician can choose whether to sell access or sell policy favors, a contribu-tion limit can improve citizen welfare by making it more likely that the politician sells access