Forging a New SME-compromise. Lobbying Strategies and Business Influence After the Financial Crisis

This article addresses private sector lobbying success in the context of post-crisis financial sector reform where media attention and the broadening of the policy community lowered, according to well established hypotheses in the literature, the chances for business lobbying to succeed. The article is based on an in-depth analysis of a striking example of lobbying success, namely the introduction a new SME compromise on lower capital requirements for SME lending in a central European banking reform text (CRR-CRD4), even though the main aspiration of the reform was to make banking regulation stricter. I argue that neither regulatory and cognitive capture nor the automatic force of business’ structural power can account for this outcome. Instead, it is the matching of lobbying strategies, based either on persuasion through evidence- or legitimacy-based arguments, with political decision-makers’ interests in a way to maximize interest overlap which is at the heart of the lobbying success.