This synthetic book will be of interest to specialists in both European institutions and lobbying. Drawing on the various research projects carried out by the three authors over the years, and on a wide range of statistical data (from the European Union’s Transparency Register and various public databases such as Eurostat), it offers a comprehensive approach to business lobbying in Europe. It draws on a wide range of political science references and offers a three-dimensional view of lobbying processes. The authors first consider lobbying from a “macro-perspective,” showing how European institutions and business groups have fostered the emergence of a system of exchanges of goods, data, and services between institutions and companies (part 1). They then analyze lobbying at a “meso-level” (part 2), focusing on how lobbying influences the definition of public policies and how it puts certain issues on the agenda. Finally, they analyze lobbying on a “micro-scale,” highlighting the existence of revolving doors and analyzing lobbying from the angle of lobbyists’ specific careers (part 3). The final chapter outlines normative perspectives for lobbying practitioners, EU institutional officials and researchers alike.
The historical part of the work is fairly short (and mainly concentrated in chapter 2). The intellectual interest of the book lies rather in the incredible synthesis achieved by the authors in articulating an impressive number of data and case studies, and proposing a global approach to business lobbying. The authors dissect level by level the type of economic interest groups that are mobilized and what they co-produce with regulators. Its strength lies in holding together what is at stake on the side of regulatory groups and on the side of economic interest groups. This commitment to bridge these two dimensions of the lobbying phenomenon can be seen, for example, in the statistics produced throughout the book. On the business side, the authors provide a list of the companies that spend the most money on lobbying in Brussels, as well as an analysis of how their budgets have evolved over time. They analyze trends in the number of companies with government affairs departments, and the number of organizations in the Transparency Register. On the “EU institutions” side, the book also presents the results of quantitative surveys of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who were asked, for example, when and how they came into contact with interest groups. The book paints a fairly accurate picture of how contact between MEPs and business varies according to political parties. On “the business interest groups” side, the book provides valuable statistical data on the careers and trajectories of lobbyists in terms of both their educational and professional backgrounds. On the institutional side, it discusses the significance of revolving doors and the regular transfers of former officials to the private sector and how careers and modes of access vary according to seniority in the profession.
Given the sheer volume of data it contains, this book is bound to be a landmark and a long-lasting addition to the bibliographies of lobbying specialists. It offers an analysis that articulates both structural dimensions and more microsocial logics. Part 1 is extremely useful in breaking down the barriers between institutions and business: it focuses on the way in which European institutions have consolidated their authority, and how companies have become increasingly dependent on what is decided in Brussels. Chapter 3 is also intellectually stimulating, focusing on the central role of using expertise as a bargaining chip between the private sector and institutions. The authors argue that information expertise has become a central resource for business access to European Commission decision-makers. They stress, however, that from their point of view, political parties are playing an increasingly important role in the decision-making system. The third section is equally original, looking at the details of the careers of lobbyists and drawing a final link between lobbying strategies and careers.
Opening up so many perspectives, it is regrettable that the book does not engage in sustained discussion with business history and economic sociology. The notion of lobbying itself has a history, and it would have been interesting to analyze in greater detail the moment when the corporatist defense of private interests through the Eurogroup system gave way to the terminologies of government affairs and public relations specialists. The first representations of economic interests emerged in Brussels as early as the 1960s, and the book does not really deal with this prehistory. These early beginnings might well have provided a means of explaining today’s emphasis on expertise in transactions between European firms and European authorities. It is also regrettable that the book goes into such great detail about what is happening in the European Parliament, to the detriment of what is happening in the EU bureaucracy itself. The book defends the idea that relations with political parties are becoming more important, but offers little in the way of data to grasp what is at stake on the side of regulatory agencies, Committee of the Permanent Representatives of the Governments of the Member States to the European Union, or the main directorate-generals of the European Commission. Maybe works on the field of eurocracy might have been worth integrating here to account for the very strong institutional hierarchies that run through European institutions. On the business side, the book focuses on government affairs departments (where lobbyists with political science backgrounds are in the majority). It does not really explore the division of labor between the public relations sector and the more technical lobbying carried out directly by lobbyists with degrees in, for example, toxicology or life sciences. This may be because political scientists tend to focus on the links between corporate political activity and elective institutions such as parliaments, and are less interested in what is at stake in technical arenas (which are not based in Brussels). These remarks in no way detract from the interest of this synthetic work for those interested in lobbying at the European level, and it is bound to be widely cited by political scientists interested in these issues.
Professor Laurens works at the intersection of the sociohistory of the state and the sociology of employer mobilizations. He is the author of Lobbyists and Bureaucrats in Brussels: Capitalism’s Brokers (2018).
