Profiling the EU lobby organizations in Banking and Finance

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.