Salter, J-PSB; (2015) Lobbying in the European regulatory arena: a study of banks and the European Banking Authority. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Extant studies of lobbying in the European Union (EU) by private actors have focused on the legislative arena: how such actors target the Commission, or the Parliament. These works have generally considered lobbyists as uniform transnational capitalist actors, seeking to extend the reach, or depth, of the single market. Recent advances in supranational institutional capacity have begun to create a ‘single European regulatory space’ (Levi-Faur, 2011), through which the EU now seeks to achieve market delivery. However, to date there has been little study of how private actors lobby this new institutional venue. Using the example of the European Banking Authority (EBA) – one of the regulatory institutions in this new arena – this thesis examines the patterns in lobbying behaviour. It takes the cases of British and German banks, and uses the notion of durable variations in domestic contexts to account for differences in their lobbying activities. This approach draws on the work of Hall and Soskice (2001), and posits that domestic financial systems and their associated regulatory regimes shape lobbying in the European regulatory arena. These features of the national landscapes condition banks’ holding, and deployment, of lobbying resources; and shape their beliefs about European bank regulation - meaning that banks engage essentially as national capitalist actors. The thesis uses a variety of qualitative data to investigate these activities and their roots. The findings show that banks’ lobbying behaviours can be seen to remain grounded in their national contexts; and in turn that the strength of these domestic institutional and ideational structures mean that a great deal of lobbying remains distinctly national, even where directed at a supranational venue. Targeting of the EBA is fragmented and contingent.

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