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Corporate political strategies in Europe: The determinants of firms' access to the European Commission

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2019

Amanda M. Alves Open the ORCID record for Amanda M. Alves [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Corporate political strategies have been used extensively by firms attempting to shape their political environments. In this context, access to targeted policymakers is essential to allow their deployment. Thus, we propose to study the determinants of access to the European Commission representatives. This research builds on the resource-based view (RBV) of firms to argue that political knowledge is a valuable resource to increase firms' degree of access to the European Commission. To test our hypotheses, we built a novel dataset merging firms characteristics with lobbying meetings information, and analyze it through negative binomial regression. The results suggest the importance of political knowledge, emphasizing that it may represent a source of sustainable competitive advantage. This study highlights interesting information that broadens the understanding of corporate political strategies in the European Union.

Keywords

corporate political strategiespolitical knowledgelobbyingEuropean Commissionnegative binomial regression
Type
Research Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 307 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © V.K. Aggarwal 2019 and published under exclusive license to Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

†

The author would like to acknowledge and thank Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung (Research Fellow of the Governance and Regulation Chair, Université Paris-Dauphine) and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful remarks during the review process.

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