Lobbying In The EU: An Often Unholy Alliance

With movies such as Inside Job and Thank you for Smoking or TV series like House of Cards, the US model of influencing decisions and policies of legislators, also known as “pressure and purchase”, has become famous worldwide as enshrining the activity of lobbyists or, more formally, public affairs managers. Millions of US dollars are being spent on influencing legislators, especially during critical moments, as can be seen by latest data regarding Facebook. However, this does not completely hold true for the European Union. Or rather: it is true that a few dozen large corporations have the material resources to attend all the available discussion fora in Brussels and thus can be regarded as “insiders” of EU Institutions, having dramatic influence on EU policy-making (as researched, among others, by the studies of Scott Greer on EU health policy-making), in many informal as well as formal ways. However, influence at the EU policy-making level is based on a peculiar and sophisticated balance of “technocratic” elements and more traditional deployment of material resources.