Explaining Lobbying Styles Across the Atlantic: An Empirical Assessment of the Cultural and Institutional Hypotheses

There is considerable consensus in the literature that lobbying in the US and the EU is characterized by markedly different lobbying styles. While US lobbying is frequently confrontational, specialized and based on financial contributions and legal tactics, the EU’s lobbying style tends to be more consensus-oriented, soft-spoken and rooted in long term relationships and trust. Two explanations for this observation have been developed so far. The first, posits that the different lobbying styles are the result of different lobbying cultures. The second attributed these diverging patterns to differences in the institutional opportunity structures. An empirical assessment of the explanatory power of these two competing hypotheses however, has proved problematic so far. Ascertaining whether interest groups behave in certain ways because of internalized cultural norms or as a result of a rational-strategic adaptation to the institutional context is problematic because of the high potential of incurring in methodological problems of observational equivalence. Studies that look at patterns of lobbying within these two political systems find it particularly problematic to discriminate between these rivalling hypotheses for the simple fact that both the cultural and institutional explanation point in the same direction. In this paper we propose an innovative empirical strategy to assess the explanatory power of cultural and institutional explanations of why lobbying styles across the Atlantic differ. A simple way out of problems of observational equivalence is to keep constant the value of one of the two independent variables. To do so, rather than focusing lobbying within the two political systems, we thus focus on EU and US lobbying in the context of international institutional venues. Relying on extensive datasets on interest groups attendance at WTO Ministerial Conferences and UN Climate Summits, we assess whether it is possible to observe significant variation in lobbying styles between EU and US interest groups.