The revolving door in Brussels: a process-oriented approach to employee recruitment by interest organisations

Abstract

The staff flow between the public sector and organised interests is metaphorically defined as 'revolving door'. This paper seeks to explain variation in hiring behaviour across interest organisations (IOs). Using data from the Comparative Interest Group-survey project, we show that revolving door practices do not occur systematically across IOs but that, under specific conditions, IOs are more likely to attract employees from the public sector than others. Our main findings demonstrate that citizen organisations are more likely to hire employees with public sector background, compared with professional and business organisations. We also show that the effect of group type is resource-sensitive, as wealthy citizen groups are more likely to hire from the public sector than wealthy business organisations. Additionally, we demonstrate that contextual factors such as the degree of political involvement and the perceived complexity of the policy environment predict hiring from the public sector.

The Revolving Door and Access to the European Commission: Does the Logic of Influence Prevail?

“…Up to now, despite the media coverage of revolving doors in the EU, the public attention for prominent public officials becoming senior consultants for significant companies after their term in office and the increased attention of transparency watchdogs such as Transparency International or Corporate European Observatory, not much systematic political science research has been conducted on this phenomenon in the EU. Most research has focused on one type of interest or organization – usually companies, consultancy firms or business associations – whilst the consequences of revolving door practices – in terms of access and influence – are rarely scrutinized (Belli and Bursens, 2021; Chalmers et al, 2021; Coen and Vannoni, 2016, 2020a; Coen and Vannoni, 2020b). Typical for much of the research on revolving door lobbying is that scholars analyse a particular type of mostly highly professionalized organizations, and possibly, this overarching organizational feature of the sampled groups might explain much of the findings in the extant literature.…”

“…We distinguish between organizations (1) not recruiting from political parties and/or government agencies and (2) those recruiting revolving door professionals. Of the 896 cases in the dataset, we have valid data on staff resources for 746 cases, and of these, 40% ( n = 302) hired staff with a public sector background (for a similar operationalization, see Belli and Bursens, 2021). We acknowledge that this is a rough operationalization.…”

Policy Consequences of Revolving-Door Lobbying

“…Normative concerns about the revolving door are motivated by the possibility that those lobbyists who formerly worked in government (which we term "revolvers") may provide unfair advantages to certain interest organizations (Alexander, Mazza, Scholz 2009, Cerrillo-i-Martínez 2017, Robertson, Sacks, Miller 2019, Silva 2019, Belli and Bursens 2021. Researchers have found an abundance of evidence that revolvers are perceived to be especially effective at policy influence.…”

“…A rapidly developing literature has emerged investigating the nature of the so-called revolving door between government office holders and interest group lobbyists. Studies of revolving-door lobbying extend from the American States (Newmark 2017, Strickland 2020) and the U.S. Congress (Vidal, Draca, Fons-Rosen 2012, Makse 2016, LaPira and Thomas 2017, McCrain 2018, Liu 2020, Shepherd and You 2020, Weschle 2021) to Europe (Blach-Ørsten, Ida, Pedersen 2017, Cerrillo-i-Martínez 2017, Dialer and Richter 2019, Silva 2019, Luechinger and Moser 2020, Belli and Bursens 2021), Argentina (Freille et al 2019), and Australia (Robertson, Sacks, Miller 2019), among others. Yet despite the considerable attention the phenomenon has attracted, very few studies measure just how much influence revolving-door lobbyists wield.…”

Rewarding or Sanctioning Performance? A critique on group dominance and counter-group dominance in public organizations

“…While promotion is considered one of the key non-monetary rewards, public organizations are faced with several dilemmas whenever it comes to selecting whom to promote. For instance, a number of public organizations have been infiltrated by mafia groups (often labeled interest groups) (Belli & Bursens, 2021), which favor promoting a select group of individuals even if they do not merit at all. In other cases, the mafias come up with tramped-up charges against an employee whom they strongly believe has overly hit the requirements for being promoted as a way of tainting such employee's file to the advantage of the preferred individual within the mafia clique.…”