Corporate Lobbying in the European Union: Strategies of Multinational Companies

In the past, the literature on EU-lobbying has mostly focused on the activities of interest associations. In contrast, this book presents a systematic analysis of factors that influence the individual lobbying decisions of Multinational Companies and their use of certain routes of access to EU institutions. In the first part, it addresses the seemingly trivial question of why business has to focus even more intensively on its lobbying activities in the policy-making processes of the European Union than on its lobbying efforts in national processes. The second part then demonstrates theoretically that certain institutional and sectoral characteristics provide a good explanatory framework for the decisions of Multinational Companies concerning the most promising lobbying strategy. In emergency situations, the lobbying activities of large companies will be re-transferred from the supranational to the national level. Eventually, all alternative hypotheses that are presented throughout the book are tested empirically by a thorough examination of the case of the Directive on end-of-life vehicles.