King's College London

New research found that politicians who leave government institutions to join private sector interests do secure access to a greater number of meetings on broader topics likely to take place at earlier stages of the policy process but not on more detailed elements policy-making that typically occur later in the policy process.

And researchers also found that the benefits of hiring former politicians and civil servants, known as ‘revolvers’, were uneven, with private lobby firms enjoying greater access to meetings than large corporations or NGOs.

The findings were revealed in a new study, Revolving door benefits? The consequences of the revolving door for political access, co-authored by Professor Anne Rasmussen (King’s College London), Dr Benjamin Egerod (Copenhagen Business School) and Jens van der Ploeg (previously employed at the University of Copenhagen).

Data for the study was drawn from work done by the Corporate Europe Observatory, which compiled a list of former EU Commission staff and politicians who had transferred to private sector organisations.

The researchers also drew on data from Transparency International, which records meetings held by the Commissioners and higher level Commission officials with private sector organisations and the subject that was discussed.

The data allowed researchers to compare the number of meetings held by private sector groups before and after employing ‘revolvers’ and also categorise the nature of what was discussed.

The researchers said: “Our findings suggest that hiring lobbyists primarily leads to increased access to meetings with broader discussions. That is, they gain access to meetings likely to take place early in the policy cycle but are less utilised to gain access to meetings where more detailed policy content is discussed.

“This reinforces the notion that the role of revolvers in in meetings with EU commissioners and top European Commission officials is not primarily to influence the outcomes of very specific policy processes, for example the decision of who gets a specific procurement contract.

“Rather, these revolvers leverage their connections to these top officials with the goal of steering the direction of the broader policy agenda.”

The researchers hope to spur a new agenda on the consequences of the revolving door, about which we still have limited knowledge. They explain that, “many studies typically focus on the economic gains of hiring revolvers, rather than the political gains in terms of access to the policy process,” and added, “although our dataset is limited in scope and focuses on a single political system, we aim to stimulate future research on this topic that probes our results across additional political systems and institutions. While some may be reassured that hiring revolvers might have less of an effect than expected, it raises concerns that the actors who potentially stand to gain—lobbying firms—possess the lowest level of democratic legitimacy.”