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Bank bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession brought into sharp relief the power that the global financial sector holds over national politics, and provoked widespread public outrage. In The Power of Inaction, Cornelia Woll details the varying relationships between financial institutions and national governments by comparing national bank rescue schemes in the United States and Europe. Woll starts with a broad overview of bank bailouts in more than twenty countries. Using extensive interviews conducted with bankers, lawmakers, and other key players, she then examines three pairs of countries where similar outcomes might be expected: the United States and United Kingdom, France and Germany, Ireland and Denmark. She finds, however, substantial variation within these pairs. In some cases the financial sector is intimately involved in the design of bailout packages; elsewhere it chooses to remain at arm's length.
Such differences are often ascribed to one of two conditions: either the state is strong and can impose terms, or the state is weak and corrupted by industry lobbying. Woll presents a third option, where the inaction of the financial sector critically shapes the design of bailout packages in favor of the industry. She demonstrates that financial institutions were most powerful in those settings where they could avoid a joint response and force national policymakers to deal with banks on a piecemeal basis. The power to remain collectively inactive, she argues, has had important consequences for bailout arrangements and ultimately affected how the public and private sectors have shared the cost burden of these massive policy decisions.
Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms lobby hard to attain a desired policy once they have defined their goals. Yet material factors are insufficient to account for these preferences. The ways in which firms are embedded in political settings are much more decisive.
Woll demonstrates her case by analyzing the surprising evolution of support from large firms for liberalization in telecommunications and international air transport in the United States and Europe. Within less than a decade, former monopolies with important home markets abandoned their earlier calls for subsidies and protectionism and joined competitive multinationals in the demand for global markets. By comparing the complex evolution of firm preferences across sectors and countries, Woll shows that firms may influence policy outcomes, but policies and politics in turn influence business demands. This is particularly true in the European Union, where the constraints of multilevel decision-making encourage firms to pay lip service to liberalization if they want to maintain good working relations with supranational officials. In the United States, firms adjust their sectoral demands to fit the government's agenda. In both contexts, the interaction between government and firm representatives affects not only the strategy but also the content of business lobbying on global trade.
Comment s'impose l'Europe? Par sa production législative et politique uniquement ou également grâce aux divers usages qui en sont faits? Ce livre s'attache à analyser qui s'implique dans l'intégration européenne, comment et dans quels buts. En mettant en évidence le rôle des acteurs en tant que vecteurs de transformations et en développant la notion d'usages de l'Europe, ce travail collectif entend apporter une perspective supplémentaire à l'agenda des recherches sur l'européanisation et l'impact de l'intégration européenne.
In recent debates about inequality, many have pointed to the predominant position of the finance. This article highlights that structural power, not lobbying resources, are key to explaining variations across countries. It examines finance-government negotiations over national bank rescue schemes during the recent financial crisis. Given the structural power of finance, the variation in bank bailouts across countries cannot be explained by lobbying differences. Instead of observing organized interest intermediation, we can see that disorganization was crucial for the financial industry to get off the hook and let the government carry the burden of stabilizing the economy. Put differently, structural power is strongest when finance remains collectively inactive. In contrast to traditional accounts of the lobbying influence of finance, the comparison highlights that the lack of organization can have crucial redistributive consequences.
Comparing bank rescue schemes in France and Germany during the banking crisis of 2008–9, this article argues that collective inaction is a little-studied aspect in the exercise of power in business–government relations. Contrary to studies that focus on lobbying, structural power or the influence of beliefs, the comparison highlights that governments depend on contributions from the financial industry during crisis management. In the negotiations to design bank support schemes, some countries, such as France, succeeded in engaging their financial sector collectively. Such public–private burden-sharing arrangements alleviate the public budget and increase mutual surveillance between banks during government support. In other countries, such as Germany, a collectively organized industry response failed, which forced the government to design an entirely public support scheme. The German government reacted to this perceived imbalance by imposing tighter banking regulation to avoid a repetition of the impotence it experienced in 2008.
Since its reform in 1998, the national association of French employers and industry, MEDEF, appears to be an example of strong interest organisation. Unlike trade unions, the peak business organisation has been stable and unified, especially in terms of membership density. Through a study of the collective action of businesses in France, this article sheds doubt on such an impression and argues that the national business association has been put severely under stress in recent years. Like all encompassing associations, MEDEF comprises a great variety of interests and constantly has to manage its internal heterogeneity. An analysis of the historical and institutional context of its recent reform demonstrates that MEDEF's forceful media campaign should not be understood as a display of actual strength and coherence; rather it is the last resort of collective action that the association can claim legitimately as its responsibility.
This article reviews the literature on lobbying in the European Union. After initial surveys of the landscape of non-governmental actor participation, theoretical investigations have focused on the modes of network governance and later on the phenomenon of Europeanization. Yet studies have increasingly moved away from considering EU lobbying as a sui generis phenomenon. Normalizing the study of interest group participation in the EU and understanding the opportunities and constraints that are characteristic for it has led more and more scholars to adopt a comparative perspective. The most interesting parallels exist between Washington and Brussels, but unfortunately there have been very few attempts to explore the connection between the American literature on lobbying and EU studies. This article makes a first step towards such a comparison and points to concepts common in comparative politics that could provide considerable insight into the study of EU lobbying.
Depuis sa réforme en 1998, le Mouvement des entreprises de France (Medef) apparaît comme une association puissante et unifiée. En étudiant l’action collective patronale en France, cet article met en doute cette impression. Contrairement aux apparences, l’organisation centrale du patronat français se trouve face à des défis comparables à la désyndicalisation des salariés. En tant que fédération, le Medef est constitué d’une multitude d’intérêts divers et doit gérer cette hétérogénéité interne avant de pouvoir agir politiquement. L’analyse du contexte historique et institutionnel de sa réforme récente montre que la nouvelle stratégie de communication politique du Medef n’atteste pas de la puissance ou de la cohérence de l’organisation ; elle est plutôt le dernier domaine d’action publique que l’association peut assumer pleinement sans perdre sa légitimité aux yeux de ses membres.
This article argues that the role the Commission plays in European foreign policies goes beyond the execution of the competences delegated by the member states. The Commission is not just the external negotiator of the EU, it can also use its powers as the guardian of the Treaties to expand its foreign policy competences. The case study of international air transport illustrates how the Commission was able to obtain an external negotiation mandate in June 2003 to which member states were originally opposed. The analysis draws particular attention to the Commission's reliance on the European Court of Justice and to a cognitive strategy centred on the United States. By means of these two tools, the Commission was able to affect the default condition of member state preferences and reorient the focal point of intergovernmental negotiations.
Pour analyser le rôle joué par la Commission dans les politiques étrangères européennes, nous montrons comment la Commission peut élargir ses compétences en utilisant ses droits en tant que gardienne des traités. L’étude de cas de la politique européenne en matière d’aviation internationale illustre comment la Commission a pu obtenir un mandat de négociation externe que les Etats membres lui avaient auparavant refusé. Pour cela la Commission s’est appuyée sur des recours juridictionnels et a employé une stratégie cognitive qui inscrit la question de l’aviation civile dans la concurrence avec les Etats-Unis. Par ces deux moyens, la Commission a su changer les préférences des Etats membres et réorienter le point focal des négociations intergouvernementales.