This project has received funding via the CIVICA Research call 2024, which is funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the CIVICA Research project. Additionally, CIVICA research projects receive financing from national funding sources and partners' own resources.
The premise of this project is that lobbying activities are drivers of instances of entrepreneurs and business associations, of research institutions, and of other groups of interests. The political outcomes are synthesis of vote expression. These two sides of the phenomenon influence the quality of the governance and the ability of the Institutions to design optimal regulations, interventions, and policies.
We will use information from three datasets: the Integrity Watch EU, the EU Transparency Register and VoteWach EU. These sources of information provide insights on who the lobbyists are, how they met members of EU institutions, and how the members of the Institutions have voted. However, to the best of our knowledge, the informative content of these datasets has been exploited only in a few studies (e.g. on votes: Hix et al., 2022; and Niebylski , 2023; on lobbyists register: Korkea-Aho, 2021; Binderkrantz et al., 2023), that analyse only one of the datasets, and do not match the information. Besides a few theses, we could not find academic studies that have analysed the content of the Integrity Watch EU database. We will fill this knowledge gap.
The vast majority of the thirteen thousand registered lobbyists (according to the 2022 report of the EU Transparency Register1) are i) companies and groups (25%), ii) trade and business associations (20%), and iii) non-governmental organizations (30%). Big companies, such as Google and Airbus, have finalized more than two hundred meetings and have several lobbyists accredited in the EU register. Three large trade (Business Europe and European Trade Union Confederation) and farmer associations (European farmers) had frequent and numerous meetings (more than two hundreds. As for the geographical coverage, about 18% of the registered lobbying entities operates in Belgium, 13% in Germany, 10% in France and 26% are evenly shared across United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Interestingly, about 4% (and 2%) are outside the EU, in the United States (and Switzerland).
The literature on the political economy in the context of climate change is vivid (e.g., Yu, 2005 and Shapiro, 2016 on the role of media; Rausser et al., 2021, on design of public-goods and redistributive policies; Bombardini, 2024 on weather shocks and climate politics).
Lobbying activities may shape the content and support of policies on the environment (cfr. Millner and Ollivier, 2016). Competing special interests on political outcomes, which are very relevant in the context of climate change (Millner and Ollivier, 2016; Hall et al., 2024)2. For instance, Böhler et al. (2022) find that climate policy supporters favor the adoption of additional climate laws, and that the activities of opponents (e.g. fossil fuel industry) does not weaken the effect. Pacca et al. (2021) investigates the determinants of lobbying and electoral incentives on environmental expenditures and outcomes.
Most of the literature focus on US, due to availability and easy access to data on political outcomes and on lobbyists activities. The three rich sources of information will allow us to derive EU-specific evidence.