Business lobbying is widespread in the European Union (EU). But because not all lobbying is successful, the question arises: when does business win and when does it lose in the context of legislative policy-making in the EU? We argue that business actors are, overall, less successful than citizen groups in the European policy process. However, they can protect their interests if interest group conflict is low or the role of the European Parliament is restricted. A new dataset on the positions of more than one thousand non-state actors with respect to 70 legislative acts proposed by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010 allows us to evaluate this argument. Empirical support for our expectations is highly robust. Our findings have implications for the literature on legislative decision-making in the EU and for research on non-state actors in international organizations.

Whereas research on corporate lobbying in the USA has produced a set of robust findings, less is known about the determinants of business political action in other policy arenas and beyond the nation-state. In particular, we do not know how well the standard profit-seeking model of firm political activity travels. The article examines this issue with an analysis of business lobbying in the EU that reflects tactical adaptation to lobbying at the supranational level. Using data on 2000 large companies, we show that a modified profit-seeking model of corporate political behaviour is generalizable to corporate lobbying in Brussels. By contrast, theories emphasizing nationally distinct types of interest intermediation find little support in the data.

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This paper develops a signaling model of corporate lobbying in democratic capitalist societies to analyze the conditions that lead to a powerful political position of business. Proceeding from the traditional dichotomy of structural economic determinants versus business’ political action, our model predicts the conditions under which elected political decisionmakers modify their policy pledges to accommodate business’ political preferences, or override business’ lobbying messages and honor their pledges. Our results show that the structural power of business over public policy is contingent on two variables: the size of reputation costs of business in relation to its material costs of lobbying; and the ratio of the policymaker's reputation constraints from policy commitments and campaign pledges to the electoral costs arising from adverse effects of policy. We evaluate our model using case studies of business lobbying on environmental and financial services regulation in Britain and Germany.

This article examines corporate participation in the UN Global Compact programme. Using data on the world's 2,000 largest companies, we address the question of why companies voluntarily assume the programme's responsibilities and promote the rights of ‘global citizenship’. Our analytic approach is to view transnational corporate political behaviour as a result of firm‐level decisions shaped by country‐level variation in political audience effects. Drawing on earlier research on more conventional forms of corporate political activity, we expect factors influential in the standard model of firm political activity to determine participation in the Global Compact. In addition, we argue that this highly visible, less instrumental dimension of a firm's political behaviour is driven by efforts to build a good environmental and human rights reputation with its audience of external actors. The importance of environmental and human rights concerns depends on the substance of the firm's business activities, the availability of investment and ‘exit’ options, and the home audience's bias towards the UN and human and environmental rights. We find support for political factors as well as firm and industry‐level characteristics influencing the decision to participate in the Global Compact.