With respect to your first point, I’m considering striking this conclusion upon reflection—see my discussion with @jackva elsewhere in this thread. In any case, my confidence level here is certainly too high given the evidence, and I really appreciate your close attention to this.
With respect to your second point, I don’t mean to imply that the lack of organized opposition is the only thing that justifies lobbying expenditure, and think my wording is sloppy here as well. I used “lack of an organized opposition” to refer broadly to oppositions that are simply doing less of the (ostensibly) effective things — lower “organizational strength” as in Caldeira and Wright (1998), number of groups, as in Wright (1990), or simply lower relative expenditure, as in Ludema, Mayda, and Mishra (2018).
The evidence in Baumgartner et al that you reference about the apparent association between lack of countermobilization and success is also related to @jackva’s concern about my underemphasis on potential lobbying equilibria here. On the one hand, I think this is clearly evidence in favor of the hypothesis that there is some efficiency in the market for lobbying- perhaps most lobbyists have a good idea of which efforts succeed, and don’t bother to countermobilize against less sophisticated opposition. On the other hand, lobbying is a sequential game, and, since the base rate for policy enactment is so low to start with, it makes sense that opposition wouldn’t appear until there’s a more significant threat.
EDIT: I’ve actually struck the first bit, with a note. I wanted to add one more thing, which is that I don’t know how much you’ve adjusted your prior on lobbying, but I wouldn’t say this has made me “optimistic” about lobbying. The core thing I’ve come away with is that lobbying for policy change is extraordinarily unlikely to succeed, but that marginal changes to increase the probability of success are (1) plausible, based on the research and (2) potentially cost-effective, based on the high value of some policies.
Thanks for your response!
With respect to your first point, I’m considering striking this conclusion upon reflection—see my discussion with @jackva elsewhere in this thread. In any case, my confidence level here is certainly too high given the evidence, and I really appreciate your close attention to this.
With respect to your second point, I don’t mean to imply that the lack of organized opposition is the only thing that justifies lobbying expenditure, and think my wording is sloppy here as well. I used “lack of an organized opposition” to refer broadly to oppositions that are simply doing less of the (ostensibly) effective things — lower “organizational strength” as in Caldeira and Wright (1998), number of groups, as in Wright (1990), or simply lower relative expenditure, as in Ludema, Mayda, and Mishra (2018).
The evidence in Baumgartner et al that you reference about the apparent association between lack of countermobilization and success is also related to @jackva’s concern about my underemphasis on potential lobbying equilibria here. On the one hand, I think this is clearly evidence in favor of the hypothesis that there is some efficiency in the market for lobbying- perhaps most lobbyists have a good idea of which efforts succeed, and don’t bother to countermobilize against less sophisticated opposition. On the other hand, lobbying is a sequential game, and, since the base rate for policy enactment is so low to start with, it makes sense that opposition wouldn’t appear until there’s a more significant threat.
EDIT: I’ve actually struck the first bit, with a note. I wanted to add one more thing, which is that I don’t know how much you’ve adjusted your prior on lobbying, but I wouldn’t say this has made me “optimistic” about lobbying. The core thing I’ve come away with is that lobbying for policy change is extraordinarily unlikely to succeed, but that marginal changes to increase the probability of success are (1) plausible, based on the research and (2) potentially cost-effective, based on the high value of some policies.