Corporate political strategies in Europe: The determinants of firms' access to the European Commission

Corporate political strategies have been used extensively by firms attempting to shape their political environments. In this context, access to targeted policymakers is essential to allow their deployment. Thus, we propose to study the determinants of access to the European Commission representatives. This research builds on the resource-based view (RBV) of firms to argue that political knowledge is a valuable resource to increase firms' degree of access to the European Commission. To test our hypotheses, we built a novel dataset merging firms characteristics with lobbying meetings information, and analyze it through negative binomial regression. The results suggest the importance of political knowledge, emphasizing that it may represent a source of sustainable competitive advantage. This study highlights interesting information that broadens the understanding of corporate political strategies in the European Union.