Half a year ago, Scott Alexander argued that there is surprisingly little money spent in US politics. Stefan Torges responded and argued that there is less German money spent on politics than on chocolate . Is it correct that this means that an additional marginal unit of political influence is really that cheap?
I was curious to think about the European institutions, why Brussels one might argue and why about the little money in politics? This is a good thing, right?
Stefan found something between 1 and 3bn for Germany. However, there is also Brussels. And the European Union does partly create policy for Germans and German business (especially the internal market policy). It should be added to the German numbers.
There is this dataset of all registered groups in Brussels that had at least one meeting with the European Commission. I took the smallest number for every organization that fell within a budget interval. This makes 1,750,213,248 Euros overall. One might argue that a few countries might have added their complete budget instead of their policy budget. On the other hand, it seems plausible that most of the organizations have drastically underestimated their numbers (I am pretty sure Google spends more than 8 million in EU politics). In this data set, there are over 4000 organizations which self-report that they have a budget smaller than 500 Euros but 0.5 or even more full-time positions. If we assume that they all spend 50,000 per year and the others also slightly underestimate their numbers, we end up with approximately 3 Billion Euros. If you do not want to add everything you could also just take the organizations with headquarters in Germany (300,000,000). This would be an underestimate as you don’t take the European association which has headquarters in Brussels.
Why do ordinary people not give money?
And only 4.5 million for the EU elections are spent by all German parties. Almost no German gives money to election campaigns. We have strict institutional rules. However, almost no one gives money to lobby groups, e.g. environmental groups. Similarly to the little funding of any charity we are just faced with a classical tragedy of the commons. In addition, I believe that the knowledge that you can buy and might have to buy political influence – even if you are on the good side – is just not that widely known.
Should we only count the German numbers or everything to calculate the german budget?
I think it makes more sense to take the whole set of lobby groups in Brussels. Why?
My interest in the total political budget stems from the question of how crowded the political field is and why not more organizations or interest groups ‘buy’ political influence.
Because of this intention, it makes more sense to take everyone who is fighting about the same regulation. I believe that this gives us a better intuition about the crowdedness.
Is there more left? Perhaps, something else is the limiting factor
There is only a 0.45 correlation between the Budget of the lobby organizations and European Parliament accreditations as well as European Commission meetings.
Maybe this means that you cannot simply buy political influence but there are greater coordination issues and other bottlenecks.
The bottleneck might be something like ” knowing the right people in politics” rather than money and a much more limited good.
And maybe this is a good thing, stabilizing a political system. Other things are also bottle-necked. I would bet that the numbers in Washington are somewhat higher once we would really compulsory register and check everything.
Is a marginal unit of politics really that cheap?
Crossposting a response I wrote in December 2020.
Half a year ago, Scott Alexander argued that there is surprisingly little money spent in US politics. Stefan Torges responded and argued that there is less German money spent on politics than on chocolate . Is it correct that this means that an additional marginal unit of political influence is really that cheap?
I was curious to think about the European institutions, why Brussels one might argue and why about the little money in politics? This is a good thing, right?
Stefan found something between 1 and 3bn for Germany. However, there is also Brussels. And the European Union does partly create policy for Germans and German business (especially the internal market policy). It should be added to the German numbers.
There is this dataset of all registered groups in Brussels that had at least one meeting with the European Commission. I took the smallest number for every organization that fell within a budget interval. This makes 1,750,213,248 Euros overall. One might argue that a few countries might have added their complete budget instead of their policy budget. On the other hand, it seems plausible that most of the organizations have drastically underestimated their numbers (I am pretty sure Google spends more than 8 million in EU politics). In this data set, there are over 4000 organizations which self-report that they have a budget smaller than 500 Euros but 0.5 or even more full-time positions. If we assume that they all spend 50,000 per year and the others also slightly underestimate their numbers, we end up with approximately 3 Billion Euros. If you do not want to add everything you could also just take the organizations with headquarters in Germany (300,000,000). This would be an underestimate as you don’t take the European association which has headquarters in Brussels.
Why do ordinary people not give money?
And only 4.5 million for the EU elections are spent by all German parties. Almost no German gives money to election campaigns. We have strict institutional rules. However, almost no one gives money to lobby groups, e.g. environmental groups. Similarly to the little funding of any charity we are just faced with a classical tragedy of the commons. In addition, I believe that the knowledge that you can buy and might have to buy political influence – even if you are on the good side – is just not that widely known.
Should we only count the German numbers or everything to calculate the german budget?
I think it makes more sense to take the whole set of lobby groups in Brussels. Why?
My interest in the total political budget stems from the question of how crowded the political field is and why not more organizations or interest groups ‘buy’ political influence.
Because of this intention, it makes more sense to take everyone who is fighting about the same regulation. I believe that this gives us a better intuition about the crowdedness.
Is there more left? Perhaps, something else is the limiting factor
There is only a 0.45 correlation between the Budget of the lobby organizations and European Parliament accreditations as well as European Commission meetings.
Maybe this means that you cannot simply buy political influence but there are greater coordination issues and other bottlenecks.
The bottleneck might be something like ” knowing the right people in politics” rather than money and a much more limited good.
And maybe this is a good thing, stabilizing a political system. Other things are also bottle-necked. I would bet that the numbers in Washington are somewhat higher once we would really compulsory register and check everything.