Research

Work in Progress

• Does Access Mean Success? Connection to Policy-Makers and Lobbying Success of Political Actors (Draft available on request)
  
  Abstract

  This article investigates the relationship between direct access to policymakers and lobbying success. I collect large-scale, unique textual data to capture the content of lobbying activities and track subsequent changes in 480 European Union regulations, from the draft to the final adopted version. I build two alternative measures to identify lobbying success of comments written by interest groups on a draft regulation: one based on plagiarism detection and the other from a large language model (GPT-4). I measure direct access to policymakers from meetings held between policymakers and interest groups. Using a sample where comments written by organizations with and without access to policymakers are balanced on observables, I find that access to policymakers is associated with a 22 to 29\% higher likelihood of lobbying success. This effect is stronger for comments from organizations with more meetings or with access to higher-level officials. Finally, I exploit the timing of meetings and turnover in policymakers across mandates to explore the underlying mechanisms. I find evidence that political connections are the primary driver of the effect of access on lobbying success, outweighing the influence of information transmission, institutional knowledge, or intrinsic quality of the organization.

  Upcoming presentations: School of Global Policy and Strategy (January 7th, UCSD); Department of Political Sciences (January 23rd, UC Riverside); GSIPE (February 8th, Berkeley).

• Revolving Doors in the European Union: Quantification and Consequences, with Jeanne Bomare (Draft available on request)
  Abstract

  This paper studies the impact of employee mobility between the European Union (EU) public sector and non-EU organizations on access to EU policymakers and EU funding. We use data from the professional network LinkedIn to identify moves across all EU hierarchy levels, both in the direction of entering and exiting the EU public sector. We identify more than 50,000 moves between 74 EU institutions and bodies and the private sector, over the 2014-2023 period. Using a dynamic difference-in-differences estimator accounting for multiple treatments, we find that hiring EU staff increases the probability of obtaining EU procurement contracts or EU grants by about 5%. Moves in the opposite direction have no effect on access to EU funding, suggesting that benefits of the hire derive from acquiring insider knowledge. Additionally, hiring Commission staff significantly boosts engagement with the Commission, with effects being particularly pronounced for moves of relatively long-term employees. Conversely, when private-sector employees transition to the Commission, organizations experience a similar 10% rise in meetings with the Commission. The symmetry of these results suggests that they are driven by the network gained through these moves.

  Data Registration Certificate

• Strategic Complementarity in NGO Advocacy: Theory and evidence from the European Commission (Draft available on request)
  Abstract

  This article analyzes the advocacy strategies of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs). I develop a model in which ENGOs can engage in costly advocacy activities to foster pro-environmental policy changes on different dimensions. The model gives insights on their optimal advocacy strategies, and their reaction functions to lobbying from other actors. Combining data on meetings with European Commission members and textual analysis to measure lobbying efforts on different topics, I find support for strategic complementarity of ENGOs efforts. ENGOs also seem to drive the lobbying agenda of the business sector on environmental topics.

  Upcoming presentation: AEA (January 3rd, San Francisco).

• Choosing Legislative Power, with David Fortunato and Florian Hollenbach
  Abstract

  In democracies, elected representatives in legislatures compete with unelected bureaucrats for influence over policy outcomes. A determining factor in this competition is the legislature’s procedural organization and endowment of tangible resources for legislative work, both of which shape its overall capacity for policy design and oversight. Importantly, nearly every democratic legislature is empowered to choose its organizational rules and resource endowment, creating a fascinating strategic choice at the heart of each democratic system: how much capacity will the legislature grant itself? We present a theoretical model of this choice in light of the legislative majority’s present and expected orientation toward the bureaucracy, its preferential dissimilarity from the opposition, and its expectations for deselection. The model is parsimonious but rich, allowing us to better understand the historical development of legislatures as well as more recent institutional changes.
• Legislative Capacity Across OECD Member States, with David Fortunato and Florian Hollenbach
  Abstract

  Legislatures vary in their capacity for detailed design and scrutiny of draft bills and oversight of the bureaucracy as a function of their formal powers and their endowment of tangible resources for legislative work. These resource endowments, such as member salaries, budgets for legislative staff, and session days, have been shown to be powerful predictors of interbranch interactions and legislative outcomes, but applied research is almost entirely limited to the study of (subnational) state governments in the US. We present new data on these resources for the national legislatures of OECD member states for the last several decades, documenting remarkable variability across units, as well as within-units over time. This variation in resource endowments presents substantial opportunity for new research in comparative political economy.
• Who lays down the law? Informational lobbying in the French assembly, with Clément Gras

Non-Academic Publications

• Trajectoires vers l’objectif zéro artificialisation nette. Éléments de méthode. (Paths to net zero land take. Methodology.), CGDD, 2019, with Adam Baïz, Charles Claron and Géraldine Ducos. [PDF]
  Media coverage: Les Echos.

• Objectif zéro artificialisation nette: quels leviers pour protéger les sols? (Net zero land take objective: what levers for soil protection?), 2019, France Stratégie. [PDF]
  Media coverage: Le Monde.