Social influence, competition and the act of lobbying

Direnç Kanol

Business and Politics, 2015, vol. 17, issue 1, 75-96

Abstract: Despite the observed frequency of firm lobbying, scholars attempting to explain this behavior have had little luck. Pushing away from theories that center on firm characteristics, this paper argues that firm lobbying can be best explained with a sociological model of competitive action. In particular, firms that perceive other firms to have influence on policy are more likely to lobby policy-makers. Since firms are both competitors in a free market and socially embedded actors, their belief in other firms’ influence on policy pushes them to engage in similar behavior in order to increase profit and survive. I test this argument with a combination of quantitative analysis of survey responses from 7247 firms in 40 countries from the World Bank Enterprise Survey and seven qualitative interviews with key firms in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The results provide evidence for the hypothesis. This finding implies that scholars should not only take into account firm characteristics, but also explore the possible effects of how a firm's decision to lobby or not is influenced by its environment.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:buspol:v:17:y:2015:i:01:p:75-96_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business and Politics from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().