Institutional Design For Environmental Acts

This paper develops a model of niche lobbying in which interest groups endogenously specialize in the acquisition of distinct types of policy-relevant information. Contrary to the view that niche strategies are chosen to soften competition and secure autonomy, we show that specialization arises as a self-enforcing equilibrium even though groups would prefer to compete over the same informational dimensions. The mechanism is demand-driven: when information acquisition is private and nonverifiable, the decision-maker’s inference from silence intensifies informational pressure on specialized groups, increasing the burden of information acquisition. We discuss the implications of these results for interest groups influence in climate and biodiversity policy.