Profiling the EU lobby organizations in Banking and Finance

Borut Sluban,Mojca Mikac,Stefano Battiston,Igor Mozetič,Petra Kralj Novak

doi:10.1007/s41109-018-0099-7

Borut Sluban, Mojca Mikac + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-018-0099-7

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Abstract

Creating a map of actors and their leanings is important for policy makers and stakeholders in the European Commission’s ‘Better Regulation Agenda’. We explore publicly available information about the European lobby organizations from the Transparency Register, and from the open public consultations in the area of Banking and Finance. We consider three complementary types of information about lobbying organizations: (i) their formal categorization in the Transparency Register, (ii) their responses to the public consultations, and (iii) their self-declared goals and activities. We consider responses to the consultations as the most relevant indicator of the actual leaning of an individual lobbyist.We partition and cluster the organizations according to their demonstrated interests and the similarities among their responses. Thus each lobby organization is assigned a profile which shows its prevailing interest in consultations’ topics, similar organizations in interests and responses, and a prototypical question and answer. We combine methods from network analysis, clustering, and text mining to obtain these profiles. Due to the non-homogeneous consultations, we find that it is crucial to first construct a response network based on interests in consultations topics, and only then proceed with more detailed analysis of the actual answers to consultations. The results provide a first step in the understanding of how lobby organizations engage in the policy making process.

Highlights

Policy changes and initiatives are often triggered by the stakeholders that are going to be affected by those future policies, e.g. a specific sector of the industry
Data and preprocessing We focus on lobby organizations registered in the EU Transparency Register (2018) and active in the area of Banking and Finance (Consultations 2018)
Selected are questions from individual consultations, where the answers show the highest level of co-voting agreement between the organizations in the cluster mainly trade unions) who agree that companies should have better understanding of the non-financial risks

Summary

Introduction

Policy changes and initiatives are often triggered by the stakeholders that are going to be affected by those future policies, e.g. a specific sector of the industry. The profiles of lobby organizations are characterized by the clusters of organizations with similar interests and actual responses (co-voting) to consultations. In “Topic communities of responding organizations” subsection we create a response network between the organizations, and detect communities with similar interests. “Clusters of co-voting organizations” subsection describes how to further partition the communities into clusters of organizations with similar answers to the same consultation questions. We create a response network which links organizations responding to the same consultations, and detect communities in it. Topic communities of responding organizations The goal of this subsection is to group lobby organizations into communities with similar interests with regard to the consultations. In the second largest community, the main topic of interest is consultation #9 (Public consultation on non-financial reporting guidelines), Fig. 1 Response network of the 565 lobby organizations. Within each topic community we form clusters of organizations with similar responses to consultations, i.e., similar voting vectors

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Findings

Conclusions