Interesting. It makes sense to me that it's more assisting natural allies than explicit bribery.
But I still sense something is going on here. It's an intuitive suspicion and I don't understand it well enough to make a strong argument for it, but I'll try to communicate what I'm thinking.
I see that special interests that have lobbying power get a lot more done than the interests that don't have as much lobbying power. And probably more so is that I hear other people saying this so much. Almost as if it's common knowledge. So this makes me think that lobbying is in some way having a huge impact.
This excerpt seems to be arguing that they have the impact by assisting natural allies rather than explicit bribery, but it doesn't seem to claim that lobbyists aren't having a big impact. Perhaps there's a lot of implicit influence going on? For example, politicians won't choose a position unless they know that they'll get the support of lobbyists. In this way, even though it isn't explicit bribing, lobbyists could still be having a huge impact.
It seems that politicians make a lot of decisions that aren't socially optimal because they want money from lobbyists and other campaign contributors. Presumably, the purpose this money serves is to keep them in office by allowing them to advertise a lot the next time they're up for reelection.
So the question then becomes, "why do they want to remain in office?". I could think of two reasons: money and power. From what I know, politicians have a pretty high salary (congressmen make ~$175k), so that's an understandable motivator. But power is the one I don't understand.
Supposedly they want to remain in office so they could use their power to have an influence. I don't know too much about politics, but it seems that politicians spend most of their time catering to lobbyists and voters rather than pushing the things they actually believe in. So much so that they aren't actually exerting that much power. And it seems that most of this catering is to special interests and is socially suboptimal. (I may very well be wrong on these points. I really don't know but it's the impression I get.)
Why are congressmen so motivated to stay in office, make $175k a year, exert a minimal amount of real power, and spend their time catering to lobbyists and making socially suboptimal decisions? I'm sure they could make twice as much in the private sector. I feel like there's something obvious that I'm missing here, but I'm genuinely confused.