Month: October 2020

It is no secret that a broad variety of firms divert significant resources into lobbying the European Union’s political institutions. Naturally, scholars have questioned whether or not private companies’ lobbying efforts actually translate into tangible changes in the content of the EU’s legislative output. Their findings suggesting that firms more often than not lose their ‘lobbying battles’ then present a puzzle. Why would firms continue to pour money into lobbying that rarely succeeds? In their article “Does it pay to lobby? Examining the link between firm lobbying and firm profitability in the European Union” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Adam William Chalmers and Francisco Santos Macedo study the relationship between firms’ lobbying efforts and a success metric arguably closer to their key interests than changing legislative outcomes: profit. Drawing on original data comprising information on the lobbying and financial performance of over 700 firms over four years, Adam and Francisco show that spending more money on lobbying is positively associated with firms’ overall profitability. While private companies’ lobbying may rarely shape EU legislation, evidence suggests “that the institutional structure and lobbying context of the EU, which both requires considerable lobbying expenditures in the form of informational lobbying, and which promotes longer term relationships between lobbyists and public officials, is conducive to seeing financial returns on firms’ lobbying efforts.”

Ever since the British electorate set the United Kingdom on a path to leave the European Union, negotiations between London and Brussels aimed at ensuring that British interests are protected along the way have been anything but the proverbial ‘walk in the park’. Several observers have pointed out that flawed assumptions held by British negotiators about their European counterparts’ willingness to meet the UK’s demands translated into stuttering talks. In their article “Bounded rationality and the Brexit negotiations: why Britain failed to understand the EU” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Filipa Figueira and Benjamin Martill explore the sources of these biased assumptions. Drawing on evidence from a series of interviews with officials in London and Brussels conducted between 2017 and 2018, Filipa and Benjamin identify several inhibitors of rational decision-making that shaped the UK’s approach to Brexit negotiations, including a reliance on ill-fitting analogies based on past experiences and the exclusion of key sources of reliable information for decision-makers. Filipa and Benjamin conclude that “evidence from the Brexit case suggests adaptation and learning may be more difficult to achieve even in situations of high policy salience, since assumptions become ‘locked in’ and discrepant evidence cast aside.”