Business Lobbying in the European Union: The Case of the European Banking Authority

An extensive body of theoretical and empirical work has examined interest group lobbying in the EU, largely focussing on efforts targeted at the legislative institutions or the various technical committees attached to them. However, recently a wave of ‘agencification’ has created a new venue in which interest groups can engage in lobbying; namely, the web of regulatory bodies which operate in between the legislative arena and the Member States. There has been little work examining efforts in this emergent regulatory arena, and so far the focus has been on the ‘demand side’ of the picture - studying the various mechanisms through which stakeholder engagement is sought by EU regulators. This paper makes an initial foray into the study of the supply side, aiming to uncover the factors which structure the lobbying of EU regulators by interest groups. Drawing on the wider EU interest group literature, it develops a set of expectations about how such activity might be structured. These are then deployed to the case of the European Banking Authority, using a data set containing xxxx documents submitted to its open consultations between 2011 and 2017. The paper finds that some factors which structure the lobbying of the legislative institutions carry through into this new arena; but also that patterns of activity remain distinctly ‘national.’ In other words, while institutional constraints in the legislative arena have tended to push interest groups to behaving according to the logic of elite pluralism, it appears that in the regulatory arena, such constraints are missing (or are weaker), and so patterns of lobbying behaviour at the domestic level are replicated at the European.