Does the Logic of Influence Prevail? Revolving Door and the Success of Insider Strategies to the European Commission

The revolving door, or the hiring of former public officials by organized interest, is often associated with the success of access strategies. Political connections and process-oriented knowledge, often accumulated through professional experiences in the public sector, are generally seen as valuable access goods. Yet, in the EU context, little is known about the extent to which revolving door practices affect access to the policy-making process. Also, how and why interest organizations may benefit from the revolving door is not well understood. Hence, this paper provides a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between the propensity to hire form the public sector and access. More specifically, we ask the following question: to what extent and under which conditions do revolving door practices facilitate access to the European Commission? Theoretically, we aim to embed the revolving door concept in a broader framework regarding the way organized interests manage their social capital. Specifically, this includes aspects such as the degree of professionalization, membership involvement, staff resources, and the overall intensity of insider lobbying. Our main hypothesis is that the interplay among these organizational factors may affect the propensity to gain access to the EC. The hypothesis is tested by combining two data-sources: 1) a dataset with publicly available records about the meetings that took place between interest groups and senior EC policymakers and 2) evidence collected through the Comparative Interest Groups-survey (www.cigsurvey.eu). Combing these data sources allows us to compare actors without access to those who have gained access. One interesting result is that the analysis shows how varying governance structures within interest organizations may affect variation of access. More specifically, the preliminary results demonstrate that strongly professionalized interest organizations that engage in revolving door practices access the EC more frequently, compared to interest organizations that do not hire from the public sector or groups that show a high level of membership involvement.