Lobbying in the European Union: A New Dataset at the Firm Level (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: The Politics of Politically Connected Firms

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new dataset of business lobbying in the European Union (EU). The dataset includes data on firms that participated in public consultations organized by the European Commission between 2013 and 2020. The public consultations cover all issue areas, including trade, the environment, and the labor market. For each contribution to the consultations, we manually coded the direction of lobbying (i.e. in favor of or in opposition to a specific policy). We then matched each firm involved with the Amadeus dataset, which captures a host of firm-level characteristics. For firms missing from the Amadeus dataset, we retrieved these characteristics directly from their public records. We also added information from the EU’s Transparency Register to this dataset. Using this novel dataset, we document interesting patterns related to how firm characteristics (e.g. size and productivity) are associated with lobbying (1) in favor of or against specific policies and (2) for more or less regulation. Given the structure of the dataset, we are also able to exploit variation across issue areas and across countries. Our paper contributes to a burgeoning literature exploring how firms influence policy-making in democracies.

Authors

• Leonardo Baccini, McGill University

• Andreas Duer, University of Salzburg