Rent seeking in a constitutional context: linkages and constraints

The constitutional environment in which rent seeking takes place has significant effects on the extent of rent-seeking activities. It creates the rules that determine contest success functions, and it creates linkages among contests for political influence. The first half of the paper develops a theory of linked rent-seeking within a democratic context analogous to that of the United States. The analysis demonstrates that linkages imply that losses from rent-seeking contests are greater than implied by the analysis of any single contest. However, electoral competition, anticorruption laws, and cultural norms can reduce the effects of linkages in well-functioning governments. The second half of the paper undertakes a preliminary statistical analysis of the main implications of the theory.  The results are consistent with the theoretical analysis. Total lobbying expenditures are more or less proportionate to the prizes at stake and are partly codetermined by linkages, but various norms and legal constraints evidently greatly reduce rent dissipation in the U. S.