Coalition Building with Expertise: An Empirical Network Analysis of Academia as a Lobbying Intermediary

Academic expertise plays a powerful role in ensuring legitimacy in the policymaking process. Though there are increasing ties between firms and academics, little attention in the political science literature has been paid to academia’s role in lobbying, despite well-developed streams on information lobbying and interest groups. The critical role of epistemic “lobbying intermediaries” – actors who facilitate lobbying between firms and policymakers through expert knowledge or evidence-based research – remains overlooked. This article explores academia’s role in coalition formation by addressing three questions: 1) What positions do academics occupy in lobbying networks?; 2) Which firms are academics connected to, and how closely are they politically aligned?; and 3) What determines the alignment between academics and firms in lobbying networks? Through an analysis of the European Union’s AI Act public consultation data, we measure the distances between academics and other stakeholders based on their political positioning, building a network of proximity between them based on their (numerical and text based) questionnaire responses on AI risk, regulation and priorities. To illustrate capture, an analysis of partnership data – including grants, press releases, and joint publications – is triangulated to show mechanisms of influence, validating research ties between select firms and academic institutions. Results show which academic actors have been captured by lobbyists – and which have not – through the salient, but generalizable, case of AI regulation. This research illustrates how academia influences lobbying coalitions, and how those coalitions, in turn, can influence academia.