Are some political systems more hospitable towards business interest representatives than others? Comparing business access across 9 European countries

Over the past decades, the question whether business gains more access compared to non-business interests has been on the forefront of many interest group debates. Most studies compare access across venues, issues, and governance levels. Systematic country comparisons are much less common and tend to focus on relatively similar North-western European countries. Nonetheless, there are theoretical arguments to assume that business access should vary substantially across political systems. For instance, the mobilization of non-business interests takes more time due to collective action problems and, therefore, non-business interests would face more threshold in younger democracies. In this paper we analyse access patterns of access across eight European countries, including several Eastern European and Western European countries. Our question is straightforward: does business have an advantage in gaining access to policymakers in some of these countries, and if so, why? We hypothesize that specific historically institutionalised differences and varying economic and social circumstances explain varying patterns of business access across Eastern and Western Europe. On the one hand, historical path dependent processes have led to varying institutionalized channels of access favouring some interests over others. On the other hand, different socio-economic needs lead to different policy priorities of governments, which favours some interests more than others. All this leads us to expect that there are relatively few incentives for policymakers to provide favourable access to business in Western European countries, while access bias to business in Eastern European countries is substantial. We analyse this expectation on the basis of the Comparative Interest Group-survey project (www.cigsurvey.eu): four of our cases are located in Western Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Portugal) and four stem from Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic). This approach allows for a unique comparison across institutional systems and identifying varying patterns of access across countries.