Corporate Political Engagement with Branches of Government: A Comparative Analysis across the US, Germany, and the UK

The interaction between organised interests, including large corporations, and governmental institutions is a central feature of the policymaking process. The responsiveness and responsibility of these institutions varies according to the type of political system, as well as with the mode of interest intermediation. It follows that such formal and informal institutional variation will lead to differential incentives for organisations to lobby. The extent to which the executive, legislators, and the bureaucracy participate in the lobbying process is of central interest for both legislative politics and interest group researchers to understand policymaking. However, cross system studies of interest representation remain the exception. In this paper, we set out to understand variation in respect to political system, comparing both parliamentary and presidential systems; and, federal and unitary states; as well as corporatist and pluralist systems. We achieve this through a comparative analysis of corporate lobbying in the US, UK, and Germany, drawing on survey data from 75 of the largest firms from these countries. We investigate empirically how perceptions of institutional variation in governmental institutional relations vary across political systems.