Random idea: crowdsourcing lobbyists

By Benjamin_Todd @ 2015-07-02T01:16 (+6)

Hi all,

A random idea I stumbled across recently: a kickstarter for lobbyists.

One of the deepest structural problems in our political system is that narrow groups with strong interests often win out over the common good.

Imagine a country of 1,000 people. A new policy is proposed that will benefit 990 people by $1, but will cost the remaining ten people $10. The net benefit to society is $990 - 10*$10 = $880, a clear win, but these sorts of policies often don't happen. That's because the ten people who are harmed are strongly incentivised to work together to lobby the government against the policy. It's much harder for the 990 people to coordinate, and each individual stands to gain only $1.

A typical example would be a corporation opposing regulation on pollution. If the regulation goes through, the shareholders of the corporation lose a lot, so will arrange a lobbying effort. The pollution causes a small harm to a much larger number of people, so is net harmful overall.

However, it's possible today that social media and crowd funding could alleviate this problem. You could use a platform like kickstarter to get each of the 990 people to pay $0.1 to fund a lobbyist to represent their interests, overwhelming the funds of the narrow interest group.

Lobbying in general seems to offer a lot of leverage. Typically only millions of dollars are spent on issues where amounts hundreds of times larger are at stake. And there have been academic studies finding the ROI on lobbying is high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-outsized-returns-from-lobbying/2011/10/10/gIQADSNEaL_blog.html

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9064

You could test this idea by running a couple of small campaigns on the side.

Any suggestions to add? Any ideas on how to make this happen?

Ben