Hey Aaron! Thanks for posting this. I am likely going to include CES in my giving this year as a result of some of the points you’ve made here.
I’ve been researching lobbying recently and I’m curious about this passage:
We will lobby legislators. Because of approval voting’s simplicity, there are opportunities for lobbying elected officials. Normally, this isn’t an option because of the conflict of interest with those elected. But the opportunity presents itself when the party in power suffers because of vote splitting yet wants to avoid implementing a complex method. There are places where RCV is stalled out where we have opportunities. These are typically higher risk but very high reward since they don’t require the same resources as a campaign. Our estimate is that they can be one sixth the expected cost per citizen compared to ballot measures when factoring in their relative probability of success. This also requires funding for a 501(c)4 to do this effectively at scale.
I’m not particularly skeptical about this one-sixth estimate, but I haven’t been able to find anything like it my lit review! Do you have some background on this research?
This estimate is based off of me asking our Director of Campaigns and Advocacy about likelihood of success with lobbying. He gave me an estimate and then I did a correction based off what I’d seen, which lowered the success probability to 5% per effort. The expected cost per person (factoring in this probability) is much lower because when it does work, you can get an entire state to change their voting method. The scale counteracts the cost and probability rather quickly.
That said, lobbying is a challenging effort. I’m cautious about spending too much time and money here without having a 501(c)4 as it can push away our resources from wins that are more likely. We have a need for momentum at the moment. Still, with the potential cost effectiveness, this is an area we’re considering in the future. It’s likely we’ll be risk averse initially as we gain experience.
If you have particular resources you’ve found on lobbying, feel free to share. Like I said, this would be a new space for us. We had one opportunity here recently, but we decided against it based on the particular circumstances.
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.
Hey Aaron! Thanks for posting this. I am likely going to include CES in my giving this year as a result of some of the points you’ve made here.
I’ve been researching lobbying recently and I’m curious about this passage:
I’m not particularly skeptical about this one-sixth estimate, but I haven’t been able to find anything like it my lit review! Do you have some background on this research?
Hi, Matt! Thanks for the question.
This estimate is based off of me asking our Director of Campaigns and Advocacy about likelihood of success with lobbying. He gave me an estimate and then I did a correction based off what I’d seen, which lowered the success probability to 5% per effort. The expected cost per person (factoring in this probability) is much lower because when it does work, you can get an entire state to change their voting method. The scale counteracts the cost and probability rather quickly.
That said, lobbying is a challenging effort. I’m cautious about spending too much time and money here without having a 501(c)4 as it can push away our resources from wins that are more likely. We have a need for momentum at the moment. Still, with the potential cost effectiveness, this is an area we’re considering in the future. It’s likely we’ll be risk averse initially as we gain experience.
If you have particular resources you’ve found on lobbying, feel free to share. Like I said, this would be a new space for us. We had one opportunity here recently, but we decided against it based on the particular circumstances.
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.