Dealing with the Lobby at the European Commission: Organisational Reforms and Individual Attitudes

In the last decade, in the context of growing popular discontent with the EU project, the European Commission has undertaken a series of administrative reforms meant to improve internal standards of conduct and to boost transparency. Regulating the interaction with the lobby (most visibly through the establishment of the Transparency Register) is part of this effort. It came against accusations of blatant conflicts of interest and corporate capture due to “revolving door” situations, as well as juicy (and damaging) press scandals featuring officials treated to expensive gifts and free dinners in Brussels' top restaurants. Taking a micro-level implementation perspective, this exploratory paper investigates how Commission officials frame and decide on their interaction with lobbyists, in the wake of the above reforms. Specifically, it offers an intra-organizational comparison between four Directorate Generals (DG Internal Market, DG Regional Policy, DG Environment and DG Competition), representative of different core institutional functions of the Commission. Methodologically, it relies on 30 in-depth interviews with staff members selected from key positions in these DGs. Findings suggest that, overall, officials evaluate similarly the boundaries of acceptable interaction with interest representatives, as they prioritize their duty of loyalty to the Commission over keeping good working relations with external actors. However, the work context creates second-order differences. Specifically, officials' perception over the institutional muscle of the Commission shapes their willingness to engage with lobbyists, with the powerful DG Competition being less open to communication, compared to the others. These findings highlight the internal heterogeneity of the Commission, conceived of as a “multi-organization” (Cram 1994), and problematize the widespread notion that it practices open access as an “institutional ideology” (Mazey and Richardson 2006).