I’ll post a summary lit review here on the forum when I’m done with my research. Spoiler alert: political scientists don’t have a great idea of how/why/whether lobbying works and research on its effectiveness is almost strictly limited to trade policy and large publicly traded firms. So you get expressions of effects like “$140 in additional shareholder value for every $1 spent on lobbying.” Interesting, but not particularly generalizable.
It seems like CES’s strategy so far has been to start small, which makes obvious sense. I’m curious to know when/if you make the decision to withdraw from a local advocacy effort that seems like it’s not paying off. It’s not obvious to me that public support is monotonically increasing in dollars spent on advocacy— what’s your stopping rule?
Right now, initiatives are our main path, but with more funds we’d be open to experimenting in lower-risk scenarios. I’d be excited to read what information you come up with.
We use polling as an initial indicator to see how receptive a demographic would be to the initiative. Fortunately, the simplicity helps us with receptivity.
Within a particular target city, we don’t want to add more dollars than necessary to an effort. Winning soundly is important, but we didn’t need to throw $1M directly into Fargo, for example. I suppose if we had, the support may have gone nonmonotinic in relation to the spend and backlashed against us. But I don’t see that as a particularly big risk for us. We’re more efficient than that.
Also, being as early as we are in the game, we’re a little cautious about taking on a city we don’t think we can win. We’re aggressive, but not more aggressive than we think we can get away with.
I’ll post a summary lit review here on the forum when I’m done with my research. Spoiler alert: political scientists don’t have a great idea of how/why/whether lobbying works and research on its effectiveness is almost strictly limited to trade policy and large publicly traded firms. So you get expressions of effects like “$140 in additional shareholder value for every $1 spent on lobbying.” Interesting, but not particularly generalizable.
It seems like CES’s strategy so far has been to start small, which makes obvious sense. I’m curious to know when/if you make the decision to withdraw from a local advocacy effort that seems like it’s not paying off. It’s not obvious to me that public support is monotonically increasing in dollars spent on advocacy— what’s your stopping rule?
Right now, initiatives are our main path, but with more funds we’d be open to experimenting in lower-risk scenarios. I’d be excited to read what information you come up with.
We use polling as an initial indicator to see how receptive a demographic would be to the initiative. Fortunately, the simplicity helps us with receptivity.
Within a particular target city, we don’t want to add more dollars than necessary to an effort. Winning soundly is important, but we didn’t need to throw $1M directly into Fargo, for example. I suppose if we had, the support may have gone nonmonotinic in relation to the spend and backlashed against us. But I don’t see that as a particularly big risk for us. We’re more efficient than that.
Also, being as early as we are in the game, we’re a little cautious about taking on a city we don’t think we can win. We’re aggressive, but not more aggressive than we think we can get away with.