Business Interests in the EU: Reflecting Economic Variation or Giving Rise to German Hegemony?

Since the beginning of European integration, business interests have been striving for active presence in Brussels. At first glance, the presence of national business interest groups (BIAs) corresponds to the economic power of their country. On closer inspection, resources indeed matter but cannot fully explain existing variations. Furthermore, there is considerable divergence concerning the ways and means of lobbying. Given a rather uniform need to be present in Brussels, how can we explain why member states of comparable economic importance vary so much in this regard, and why do even BIAs from one single country opt for different strategies? What implications can we derive from these differences for European interest mediation? We take four steps to explain variations in representation: First, we construct a ‘lobbying capability score’ of all national BIAs in the EU Transparency Register, comprising four factors: resources spent on EU lobbying, an office in Brussels, European Parliament registration, and membership in EU BIAs. We then evaluate to what degree country- and sector-specific factors as well as the presence of national consultancies and firms in Brussels account for the variation in BIA presence. In a third step, we compare access strategies of BIAs coming from countries of similar size; lastly, we take a closer look at the German case for explaining within-case variations. Apart from TR and Eurostat data, we base our analysis on a large N-survey and about 100 interviews with German BIAs in order to better understand the divergence in strategies and what these mean in terms of attaining hegemony.