Corporate political strategies have been used extensively by firms attempting to shape their political environments. In this context, access to targeted policy-makers is essential to allow their deployment. Thus, we propose to study the determinants of access to the European Commission representatives. This research builds on the resource-based view (RBV) of firms to argue that political knowledge is a valuable resource to increase firms' degree of access to the European Commission. To test our hypotheses, we built a novel dataset merging firms characteristics with lobbying meetings information, and analyze it through negative binomial regression. The results suggest the importance of political knowledge, emphasizing that it may represent a source of sustainable competitive advantage. This study highlights interesting information that broadens the understanding of corporate political strategies in the European Union.
