Corporate Monitoring in the European Union

Non-compliance with the European Union (EU) law is believed to be a significant political problem. The European Commission does not have the capacity to monitor the application of EU legislation in member states; and therefore, the institution relies on the cooperation of domestic actors in order to detect deviations from law. Many studies analysed the role of citizens and citizen interest groups in the application stage. Despite being acknowledged as important players in the EU-level lobbying during the earlier stages of policy-making, corporate actors are believed to be less relevant with regard to monitoring and cooperating with political actors during practical implementation. At the same time, corporate lobbying is also believed to be harmful to the democratic legitimacy of the EU. This paper challenges those assumptions by analysing the role of corporate actors in the policy implementation stage. I assume that corporate actors are strongly affected by the application of EU policies and generally possess the abundance of administrative resources; and for that reason, they can in fact monitor the application of EU legislation more effectively than non-business actors. I argue that corporate actors lobby both EU-level and national-level implementers when EU legislation is applied in practice, and the motivation behind corporate lobbying during policy implementation is to provide the implementers with application-related information that are collected via monitoring. Thanks to the better reporting of implementation and better identification of application problems, fire alarm oversight in the EU improves and the quality of application of EU legislation increases with more active business involvement in monitoring. Hence, corporate lobbying in the implementation stage actually positively contributes to compliance with EU law. The study uses the data collected from 205 interest groups that are active in the EU via an online survey. Differences across corporate actors (individual vs. organised, European vs. national) are analysed in the study.