Diplomacy and Foreign Lobbying

• In Event: The Role of Bureaucrats in International Cooperation

Abstract

Though the vast majority of countries maintain an embassy in Washington, DC, foreign governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to lobby US policymakers through US agents. Departing from canonical models of domestic lobbying, we propose that foreign governments lobby policymakers not to convey information but to receive it, and that the incentives to do so increase with the value of that information. We show that foreign government lobbying expenditures increase under divided US government and in the earlier years of a president’s term, conditions that heighten uncertainty surrounding the execution of US foreign policy; and further, that they decrease during US ambassadorial vacancies, periods during which acting officials tend not to deviate from status quo policies. These findings paint a picture of foreign governments lobbying reactively rather than proactively. Contrary to popular accounts of foreign governments malignly influencing the US political system through hired agents, our results suggest that foreign lobbying can facilitate intergovernmental cooperation by reducing informational asymmetries in ways that conventional bureaucratic and diplomatic channels cannot.

Authors

• Matt Malis, New York University

• Hye Young You, New York University