From REACH to the Regulation of Financial Services: The Political Influence of Business in the European Union

Recent quantitative research has shown that business actors are overall less successful than citizen groups in European Union (EU) legislative politics (Dür et al. 2015). Three objections can be raised against this finding. First, it may miss business success at the agenda setting stage. Only proposals that are in one way or another acceptable to business interests may make it onto the legislative agenda. Second, quantitative research may have overlooked interdependencies among legislative proposals. Business actors may be able to offset their losses on one proposal with gains on a closely related proposal. Third, the focus on legislative politics may draw attention away from business success on non-legislative decisions. In this paper, we address these objections both theoretically and relying on three in-depth case studies. We counter the agenda-setting and interdependencies arguments, but support the non-legislative decisions point. The cases we look at are the regulation of chemicals in the EU, the reform of the EU’s financial market rules in the wake of the financial crisis and the formulation of the EU’s position in external trade negotiations. Our in-depth case analyses enable us to see which policy proposals actually made it onto the political agenda and which ones never materialized. The fact that our cases concern policy areas rather than individual legislative proposals also makes it possible for us to study interdependencies among proposals. Finally, the trade negotiations case allows us to analyze business success on non-legislative matters in the EU. The paper makes a key contribution to the literature on interest group influence in the EU.