Strategic Mobilization of Stakeholders

• In Event: Bargaining and Organizing

Abstract

In addition to seeking political influence through lobbying and election campaign contributions, interest groups sometimes mobilize their stakeholders – members, employees, customers, suppliers – by organizing public rallies, petitions and letter-writing campaigns to demonstrate support for a policy issue. We develop a model of a interest group’s strategic decision to mobilize supportive stakeholders that assesses the conditions under which mobilization is effective in influencing elected policymakers’ decisions, and also whether a low participation-cost petition or higher participation-cost public rally method is optimal. Our model identifies first that stakeholder events are influential when politicians are uncertain about the scope and intensity of voter preferences for a policy issue, including the saliency of the policy for voters in their electoral vote for the politician. Second, interest groups need to mobilize a sufficient number of stakeholders relative to politicians’ minimum threshold expectations to cause politicians to revise prior beliefs that implementing the policy could lead to more electoral vote losses from vote-switching opposers of the policy than vote gains from vote-switching supporters. Finally, the distribution of voter preferences – defined by supporters and opposers and vote-switchers and non-switchers – determines whether the interest group will organize either a petition or a rally in order to change politicians’ prior beliefs about the electoral impact of the policy.

Author

• Davin Raiha, Indiana University