Interest groups are often highly selective regarding which policymakers to meet and when to meet them. How valuable are private meetings with policymakers as a function of their preferences and bargaining power, and when do interest group prefer access early or late in the legislative process? To answer these questions, we study a model of informational lobbying with a collective decision-making body and endogenous reforms. We show that the value of gaining private access to legislators depends not only on their ideological alignment with the interest group, but also on their ideological alignment with the median of the legislature and with the agenda setter. Moreover, the value of access to a particular legislator depends on the ideological alignment between the median and the agenda setter, even when that legislator is neither of them. Finally, we show that the agenda setter herself may not be a particularly valuable target and that she can be influenced by a simple cheap talk recommendation even though the interest group has transparent motives.

How does blaming and crediting affect the implementation of policies and what are the constraints that reputation-concerned politicians face in commenting about bureaucrats? On one hand, politicians may want to claim credit when things go well and deflect blame when outcomes go awry. On the other, the distribution of blame and credit not only affects the politicians' reputation but also those of bureaucratic agencies and potentially their willingness to work over time. To investigate this tension, we develop and analyze a model where a bureaucrat cares about his reputation vis-a-vis an interested audience, and the politician can blame the bureaucrat for failed policies or give credit for successes via cheap talk. We show that the bureaucrat can be induced to exert more effort through blame and credit, but that the politician is constrained in communication by considerations for future effort and her own reputation concerns.

If states want to cooperate under uncertainty about other states' preferences, when do they prefer that international organizations (IOs) are involved? We analyze a formal model of coordinated adaptation in which states transmit information about their domestic preferences through cheap talk and burned money. We show that states gain from delegation through achieving more policy coordination, but that this goes hand in hand with more inefficient signaling. The involvement of IOs implies that states have stronger incentives to misrepresent information to induce coordinated policies that are individually optimal. Because IOs are less interested in the distribution of gains from cooperation, policies are more sensitive to states' signals, making lying more attractive than when states would cooperate absent IOs. This implies that states may find it optimal to cooperate outside IOs with too much disagreement and uncertainty. We discuss the robustness of our results to different levels of enforcement capabilities of IOs and bargaining mechanisms, and provide implications for institutional design.

What can interest group scholars, practitioners, and policymakers conceptually learn about influence from formal theories of informational lobbying? This article has two objectives. The first is to help clarify the fundamental components of informational lobbying models and how they differ from other lobbying mechanisms. To illustrate informational lobbying and influence attempts, I provide examples from a sample of 91 emails sent by interest groups to the permanent Dutch representative in the European Union. The second objective is to list common determinants of interest groups' influence in informational lobbying models and illustrate when and why they are especially salient. This paper summarizes how the nature of communication and preferences shape interest group influence.