New Avenues in Business Lobbying in the European Parliament: Using Social Network Analysis to Identify Crutial Members of the European Parliament

Business lobbying is a critical component of the policymaking process within the European Union (EU), significantly influencing legislation and regulatory frameworks. As the EU continues to expand its regulatory reach, understanding the dynamics of business lobbying becomes increasingly essential (Klüver, 2013). Lobbying and lobbyist target all three EU institutions. Boräng & Naurin (2015) and Vikberg (2019) concentrate on business lobbying in the European Commission, while Ehrlich & Jones (2016) and Barron & Trouille (2016) focus on lobbying activities targeting the Council. Similar to Marshall (2010) and De Bruycker (2016), we investigate business lobbying in the European Parliament (EP). Regarding the EP, Marshall (2010) explains that committees have informal yet influential elites that play a crucial role in the decision-making process. Bruycker (2016) reinforces this point by noting that business lobbyists prioritise their counterparts based on a combination of power-related factors and the general ideological orientation of the groups inside the European Parliament. He concludes that business lobbyists must be ready to create ties not only with MEPs who are friendly to them, but also with their opponents, and most importantly with the ones who are the most influential, regardless of whether they are allies or opponents. Our main research question is twofold: 1) First, whom to lobby? and 2) Second, how can legislative big data be of help in identifying crucial and impactful Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Using European parliamentary co-sponsorship data provided by Eulytix (www.eulytix.eu), we analyse the social networks of MEPs. Based on their network position and using different network matrices, we identify the crucial MEPs, who could be subject of lobbying activity. Besides, we also draw up the cosponsorship network of successfully adopted legislative amendments and analyse in what ways the network of impactful MEPs differs from the one based exclusively on legislative activity. Additionally, using the two most important variables of MEPs, we transform the MEP-level network into the networks of EP Groups and Member States.