Shifting battlegrounds: Corporate Political Activity in the General Data Protection Regulation

Scholarship on corporate political activity (CPA) has remained largely silent
on the substance of information strategies that firms utilize to influence
policymakers. To address this deficiency, our study is situated in the
European Union (EU), where political scientists have noted information
strategies to be central to achieving lobbying success; the EU also provides
a context of global norm-setting activities, especially with its General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR). Aided by recent advances in the field of
unsupervised machine learning, we performed a structural topic model
analysis of the entire set of lobby documents submitted during two GDPR
consultations, which were obtained via a so-called Freedom of Information
request. Our analysis of the substance of information strategies reveals
that the two policy phases constitute “shifting battlegrounds,” where firms
first seek to influence what is included and excluded in the legislation, after
which they engage the more specific interests of other stakeholders. Our
main theoretical contribution concerns the identification of two distinct
information strategies. Furthermore, we point at the need for more
attention for institutional procedures and for the role of other stakeholders’
lobbying activities in CPA research.