Corporate Political Access Across Europe Evidence From Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands

The political power of business is central to the analysis of contemporary democracies. Recent research has documented an increasing presence of corporations in some political systems. However, there is a lack of studies comparing corporations' political role across different countries. In this paper, we compare corporate political access in three traditionally corporatist countries in which lobbying by corporations has been less common due to the strong role of business associations. We analyze the importance of factors at different levels—the firm level, the sector level and the country level—in explaining corporate political access. Empirically, we rely on surveys of large corporations in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands (N = 657). Our results provide an important corrective to research pointing to a uniform rise in corporate political activity: We document marked country differences, with a high level of corporate political activity in the Netherlands and much lower levels in the two Nordic countries.