Links between businesses and politics II: revolving door and access to ministers
Eline Huisman and Ariejan Korteweg of the Volkskrant have done some good investigative journalism by finding out how often companies, organisations and inviduals have visited the current ministers (this data wasn’t publicly available in the Netherlands). It’s interesting to compare the top–10 of companies with access to ministers to the top–10 of revolving door companies (companies where national politicians have or have had a position).
Position of companies on the access to ministers ranking and the revolving door ranking
| Access | Revolving door | |
|---|---|---|
| Air France-KLM | 1 | 6 |
| Rabobank | 2 | 1 |
| Shell | 3 | 2 |
| ING Bank | 4 | 5 |
| ABN AMRO | 5 | 3 |
| Schiphol | 6 | - |
| Aegon | 7 | 8 |
| KPN | 8 | - |
| SNS Reaal | 9 | - |
| KPMG | 10 | 4 |
| NS | 7 | |
| Delta Lloyd | - | 9 |
| PGGM | 10 |
I’m sure more can be said about this, but the comparison shows there’s conciderable overlap between the two lists (for the geeks among you: the Jaccard index is 0.54). The following companies score high on both measures of political ties: Air France-KLM, Rabobank, Shell, ING Bank, ABN Amro, Aegon and KPMG. Dutch Railways (NS) and PGGM don’t feature in the Volkskrant business ranking because they classify them as semipublic.
Of course, these lists provide no basis for firm conclusions about cause and effect. However, one can imagine that companies that participate actively in the revolving door could have easier access to ministers.
The details of the Volkskrant investigation can be found in this visualisation, which unfortunately isn’t easily searcheable. The underlying data are available here as csv. If you’d classify NS and PGGM as companies in the Volkskrant list, the overlap wouldn’t change because other companies would drop out of the top–10. Further, for comparability I’ve removed industry and lobby organisations such as employers’ organisation VNO-NCW from the access to ministers ranking. Alphabetical order was used where two companies have the same score.