It Takes Two to Tango: Lobbies and the Political Business Cycle.

Merging the impacts of interest groups on economic growth with governments' interest in unemployment and inflation, there should be a link between political business cycles and interest group formation. Interpreting Olson's Law in a short-run perspective and integrating it with political business cycles, this contribution examines the link. We illustrate how such a model could look like, before investigating the relationship of lobbies, governments and voters empirically. As the time-series-analysis based on the German lobby-list shows, lobbies strategically organize their activity to foster reelection of the governments: It takes two to tango. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]