"Lobbying and Policy Change" 20 years later

If the affected parties have any political influence, however, potential losers will be more active and determined than potential winners; the outcome will be biased in their favor and inevitably more expensive and less effective than initially planned.

Their results are deeply troubling. They found that once we take into account the views of rich citizens and interest groups, the preferences of average citizens had almost no impact on which policies were adopted. When the rich wanted something different to the average American, they almost always got their way.

A biologist observed that “when a territory holder is challenged by a rival, the owner almost always wins the contest—usually within a matter of seconds.” In human affairs, the same simple rule explains much of what happens when institutions attempt to reform themselves, in “reorganizations” and “restructuring” of companies, and in efforts to ratio

a recent analysis finds that doing so can also result in “decreasing the space for governing actors’ discretion.”