The 2022–2023 Qatargate scandal – which entailed the widespread undermining of Union democracy by members of the European Parliament acting on behalf of third countries – has rocked the European Union to its core. The proposal by the Commission aimed at establishing transparency and accountability surrounding such activities cannot therefore come at a more appropriate time. But does the proposal live up to its objectives? Here, this piece casts doubt on whether that is the case, with this piece exploring Qatargate as an example, as well as the content, constitutionality, and criticism of the proposal. This Article also makes comparisons to Union-based representation activities and the Commission’s approach to antidumping, and shines light on the Commission’s treatment of third-country actors and representatives thereof.

Business actors play increasingly important roles in global governance and international regulation. This paper considers how regime complexity influences the roles of businesses and impacts opportunities for business influence on international regulatory regimes. We conducted a scoping literature review of 243 articles from the International Regime Complexity (IRC) theory literature to explore if and how complexity affects the roles of businesses and their influence on international regulation. We found that complexity presents opportunities for businesses to regime shift and exploit knowledge asymmetry in order to influence international regulation. Further, IRC theory illustrates how the roles of businesses interact and leverage one another in order to create better opportunities for influence in specific international regulatory regimes. This paper contributes to IRC theory by building on the existing non-state actor discussions and offering specific theorization of business behavior, thus starting to bridge the gap between the empirical and theoretical understanding. Second, it contributes to existing discussions in business and politics literature by developing existing knowledge on the roles of businesses in global governance to better reflect the added dimension of complexity.

Policy specialization in the U.S. Congress benefits the institution collectively and members individually. Yet members of Congress (MCs) are insufficiently specialized to optimize lawmaking success (Volden and Wiseman 2020). In this paper, we demonstrate the increasing propensity of MCs to generalize legislatively is driven largely by an expansion of MC legislative agendas in business domains. We then offer and test an explanation for this trend whereby business’s increasing demand for congressional attention (Drutman 2015) has outpaced the supply of congressional capacity to serve business needs (Crossen, Furnas, LaPira, and Burgat 2020; McKay 2022). This unmet demand incentivizes MCs to expand their business portfolio, which results in increased campaign contributions from business political action committees (PACs). We provide evidence consistent with this theory, showing that under conditions of access scarcity, MCs benefit financially (in terms of increased business PAC contributions) by broadening the number of business domains they are active in legislatively.

This study analyzes direct lobbying in the Chilean Congress, contributing to the debate over which legislators are targeted by interest groups. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset constructed from legally mandated records of lobbying meetings, we test theoretical implications predominantly derived from the US context within a different presidential democracy. The focus is on the legislative targets of business and labor groups. The results reveal a marked preference for lobbying allies, aligning with recent theories of information transmission and legislative subsidies. This pattern holds true for both business and labor groups and highlights the significance of ideological alignment for legislative lobbying in Chile. Additionally, the study finds that legislators with influential positions, such as those on key committees or centrally located in the bill collaboration network, are more frequently targeted. This research provides key insights into the dynamics of legislative lobbying in a non-US context, underscoring the generalizability of established theoretical frameworks.

Lobbyists sometimes represent clients with seemingly adversarial policy interests. We seek to explain the occurrence of such ostensible conflicts of interest. In hiring lobbyists, interests encounter a tradeoff between access and agency. Although some lobbyists promise access to lawmakers, they may not lobby as contracted. Interests hire seemingly conflicted lobbyists more often when access is costlier and reputational risks are smaller. We examine the hiring of tobacco lobbyists by health interests, given the possibilities for shirking and reputational damage. We find that institutions such as hospitals hire tobacco lobbyists regularly and more often than membership-based health groups. Intergroup competition for access and lobby laws, especially anti-conflict laws, affect the use of tobacco lobbyists independent of rates of multi-client lobbying. Conflicts are more common today than ever but interests can protect themselves somewhat from opportunistic agents. Our findings also suggest that reforms can improve the representation of client interests.

Using archival material from states, international organizations, and business actors, this paper explores how the Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments (APPI), a transnational business interest association (BIA), liaised with different international institutions to lobby for better foreign investment protection. We zoom in on the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank to examine how APPI influenced the global institutional landscape during its heydays from 1958 until 1974. We show that business actors, particularly oil and banking corporations, created APPI as a nimble, efficient alliance that could move faster than existing BIAs. We further demonstrate how companies “forum shop” between different BIAs, and how APPI injected its ideas into the policymaking process, using the framework of the three faces of power. By shedding light on the role private business actors played in foreign investor protection, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the emergence of global economic governance in the second half of the 20th century.

This article examines the Committee for Constitutional Government, a conservative organization that spearheaded a novel form of mass-based mobilization and direct-mail propaganda to counter New Deal reforms from 1937 to the late 1950s. I argue that the members of the committee offered a supple and variegated response to New Deal liberalism, one with deep roots in the American past. Organizationally, the committee differed from other conservative groups of the period in the vastly greater reach of its propaganda, the small-donor financial base of its operations, and its extensive cultivation of a grassroots movement committed to right-wing reform. The committee was a critical political actor from 1937 to 1955, systematically shaping legislation and countering the trend toward social democracy in America. The ultimate result of its campaigns was to retard the growth of the administrative state and help formulate a cogent conservative critique of reformist liberalism.

In recent years, the movement of personnel from the public sector to interest groups has garnered considerable attention throughout Europe. Consequently, there has been an increased focus on the phenomenon of revolving door lobbyists within academic literature. This research contributes to this scholarly discussion by examining how the employment of such lobbyists facilitates access. We argue that interest groups gain advantages by recruiting individuals from the public sector in policy domains with limited mobilization, but this benefit decreases as more interest groups mobilize. Our analysis of survey data from seven European political systems supports these expectations, indicating that recruiting professionals with experience in the public sector enhances access, especially in policy areas with minimal lobbying activity. This highlights the potential for interest mobilization to counterbalance the advantages of hiring revolving door lobbyists.

Research on the activities and influence of interest groups in state legislatures faces a data problem: we are missing a comprehensive, systematic dataset of interest groups’ policy preferences on state legislation. We address this gap by introducing the Dataset on Policy Choice and Organizational Representation in the United States (CHORUS). This dataset compiles over 13 million policy positions stated by tens of thousands of interest groups and individuals on bills in 17 state legislatures over the past 25 years. We describe the process used to construct CHORUS and present a new network science technique for analyzing policy position data from interest groups: the layered stochastic block model, which groups similar interest groups and bills together, respectively, based on patterns in the policy positions. Through two demonstrative applications, we show the utility of these data, combined with our novel analytical approach, for understanding interest group configurations in different state legislatures and policy areas.

Existing research on lobbying has predominantly focused on its material returns, such as equity returns, stock prices, and government contracts while overlooking its informational impact. This paper addresses this gap by investigating to what extent and under what conditions policymakers assimilate information delivered through corporate lobbying. Drawing on an informational perspective, it proposes that the informational effect of lobbying is moderated by the information asymmetry between policymakers and firms. Focusing on the U.S. ride-hailing industry, this study utilizes a unique dataset on U.S. state legislatures’ adoption of the model policy lobbied by ride-hailing companies. The results reveal that the informational impact of corporate lobbying is highly contingent upon the presence of information asymmetry between policymakers and firms, which can be attributed to policymakers’ resources for independent information gathering, information deliberation through public hearings or media discussions, and countervailing lobbying efforts.

This study examines interest groups’ influence on the European Commission’s policy agenda. We argue that organizations can gain agenda-setting influence by strategically emphasizing different types of information. Analyzing a novel dataset on the engagement of 158 interest groups across 65 policy issues, we find that prioritizing information about audience support is more advantageous than emphasizing expert information. However, the effectiveness of highlighting the scope of audience support depends on the level of issue salience and degree of interest mobilization. Specifically, our findings indicate that when dealing with issues characterized by quiet politics, there are no systematic differences among groups employing distinct modes of informational lobbying.

This article provides an empirical overview of federal lobbying in Canada, examining lobbying contacts by field and sector from 2011 to 2022. We track shifts in lobbying representation over this period, including across Harper Conservative and Trudeau Liberal administrations. The study reveals the dominance of business interests in lobbying in Canada and a high level of lobbying concentration. By sector, export-oriented industries with high environmental and climatic impacts—namely, agriculture, fossil fuel and manufacturing industries—predominate. With the transition to Trudeau, we find a significant increase in overall rates of lobbying and a modest increase in the ratio of public interest representation. Overall, the lobbying industry is characterized by greater access but unequal voice.