Legislators in a representative democracy are modeled as being able to allocate a fixed amount of effort between two objectives: national policymaking and local benefit-seeking. The model predicts that the effort allocated to local benefit-seeking should be a negative function of the population...

The mutually beneficial connection between industries and the governments that regulate them is the subject of a large literature led by George Stigler (1971). What has not been studied is how firms choose their desired policies from the set including entry barriers, price floors, subsidies, and...