Commissioned Book Review: Exploring Two Facets of Corporate Power in EU Policymaking
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919899348 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Onna Malou van den Broek |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) NP3 –NP4
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Exploring Two Facets of
Corporate Power in EU
Policymaking
899348PSW0010.1177/1478929919899348Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Corporate Power and Regulation: Consumers
and the Environment in the European
Union by Sandra Eckert (ed.). London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 370 pp., $80.00, ISBN
9783030054632.
The Political Influence of Business in the
European Union by Andreas Dür, Dave
Marshall and Patrick Bernhagen (eds).
Michigan: Michigan Publishing, 2019. 212 pp., $75.00,
ISBN 9780472131181.
Two books purport to explain the power and
influence of corporate actors over EU regula-
tion (‘Does the EU promote corporate or public
interests?’). Both, however, reach very different
conclusions. Eckert concludes in their book
Corporate Power and Regulation that ‘policy-
makers have limited capacity to effectively pose
a regulatory threat, while corporate actors do, in
turn, pose a real challenge to regulation’ (p.
273). She explains that ‘there is an eminent risk
for regulators to reward gatekeeping (expert),
protect market power (innovator) and amplify
autonomy (operator)’ (p. 12). Dür, Marshall and
Bernhagen, however, find in their book, The
Political Influence of Business in the European
Union, that ‘business interests are not more
influential than other interests in shaping con-
temporary EU policies’ as they see ‘a shift away
from a low-regulation status quo favoured by
business interests toward a high regulation out-
come favoured by citizen groups’ (p. 4).
But a close reading reveals that these claims
need not be contradictory. As the books study dif-
ferent forms of corporate power for different
regulatory types in different phases of the policy
cycle, they complement each other nicely (see
Table 1-part A). Broadly, Eckert studies the sec-
ond dimension of power at the agenda-setting
phase, while Dür et al. look into the first dimen-
sion of power at the decision-making stage.
Eckert examines three cases where industries
prevented, shaped and made non-legislative EU
policies through their roles as expert, innovator
or operator. By emphasizing the role of voluntary
agreements, defined as business actors’ engage-
ment in self-regulation, the book addresses the
issue of regulatory power in avoiding public
regulation. In comparison, Dür and colleagues
explain differences in lobbying success between
business and non-business actors based on an
innovative measurement derived from the large
INTEREURO database. Simplified, lobby suc-
cess refers to the extent to which an actor man-
ages to pull to the outcome closer to its ideal
point relative to the reversion point (see chapter
3). Their focus is on legislative regulations and
instrumental power through lobbying activities.
Both books build upon the interest group liter-
ature, which argues that the currency of EU lobby-
ing is information. Eckert shows that business
gains expert authority over policymaking when
they have ‘specialised knowledge on highly com-
plex issues which cannot easily be reproduced in
the public arena’ (p. 6). When policy issues are
debated in ‘technical terms’ and become more
complex, business is better positioned to frame the
EU debate. This is supported by Dür et al., who go
one step further by incorporating the ‘demand
side’: they argue that business expertise (informa-
tion supply) can only increase lobby success if
decision makers demand such expertise (p. 125).
This theoretical divergence reflects the broader
debate on the degree of agency that policymakers
bear within fixed structures that determine their
leeway (see Table 1-part B). Eckert departs from
the resource dependency theory and argues that
EU policymakers rely on firm resources, such as
knowledge and specialized information, to reduce
policymaking costs. Dür et al. depart from Policy
and Bureau Maximization Theories and argue that
due to EU institutional set-ups, policymakers
become policy entrepreneurs.
In addition, both books emphasize the impor-
tance of ‘countervailing forces’, or as Eckert
calls them ‘counter experts’, by underlining the
competition between actors to supply private
information. Dür et al. show that when informa-
tion is offered by many lobby groups, its value
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