From Politico:

The influence game may not be as different between Brussels and Washington as people thought. We hold these truths to be self-evident: European lobbyists are as suave, subtle and sophisticated as their American counterparts are loud, brash and willing to step on toes to achieve their goals.

Or at least that’s the caricature that has dominated conversation in Brussels since the €12 billion Alstom-GE merger — a deal that was green-lighted by the European Commission earlier this month.

Outside observers speculated on how hard it must have been for the Americans to bite their collective tongue when meeting EU officials, and how tricky it would have been for local lobbyists to convince GE’s hired guns that foot-stomping and threats to bring down legislative proposals get you nowhere in Brussels.

The belief that cultural traditions underpin the differences between public affairs traditions in the EU and the United States is pervasive, prompting academic studies and industry navel-gazing.

But is it real? Does the transatlantic cultural divide over how to wield influence actually exist?

Experts and insiders say no, that any real differences in approach are overstated and often easily overcome.

What has long been billed as a clash of civilizations may simply be the result of smart professionals adapting to different institutional ecosystems.

“Many people think it is cultural, but I think the institutional context is more important in driving behavior,” said Christine Mahoney, an American who in 2004 was an intern at British lobby firm DLA, which was then on the cusp of a merger with two U.S. law firms which created DLA Piper.

Mahoney, now an expert on lobbying at the University of Virginia, said that at no time did the American side of the business come crashing through the front door of their new Brussels offices to demand a more gung-ho approach to wielding influence. The Americans understood that different institutions required different lobbying solutions.

Mahoney, who is the author of “Brussels vs. the Beltway: Advocacy in the United States and the European Union,” said Americans arriving in Brussels quickly adapt to a slower, more consensual approach to policymaking, in which the scuttling of legislation is not an option.

“Often lobbyists from the U.S. do not understand that, in the EU, the Commission has sole right of initiative,” Mahoney said. “When the Commission proposes a policy, it almost always becomes law.”

What this means is that the real bargaining is done before officials have even set pen to paper. The best a lobbyist or client can hope for once the legislative train has left the station is to smooth some of the rough edges.

“In the U.S., lobbyists are often trying to kill bills, either at a committee level or on the floor,” she said. “In Europe, if your strategy is to kill every bill, you are going to be very disappointed.”

So, while no lobbyist in town denies their M.O. is a world away from that of their Washington counterparts, there is broad agreement that these differences are the product of institutional realities, rather than any deep-seated cultural divide.

Brussels lobbyist James Stevens, a Briton with the PR-lobby firm FleishmanHillard, has worked on both sides of the Atlantic and said the biggest obstacle for American company executives is understanding how mind-numbingly slow the EU legislative process can be.

While the pace of legislative reform can slow down in Congress, when both political parties and the White House decide something needs to move through the system swiftly, they can make it happen. In the EU, reform occurs at a snail’s pace, no matter what the political atmosphere.

“One study suggested the average piece of legislation takes an average of 31 months — and that’s when the system is at its most effective,” Stevens said. “Compare that to the U.S. When I was there and it was two weeks before the midterms, [then majority whip] Harry Reid said he would ‘do energy.’ It is a different world.”

Stevens said the slowness of the EU system plays an important part in how European lobbyists go about their business. They engage in a slow-paced, often highly technical game of shaping policy outcomes, which involves patience and a willingness to accept the high number of billable hours.

“There is an understanding that the things that affect a business take a long time,” he said. “You will have to invest over that period of time; understand that it might have an impact three years down the track.”

Stevens said that when cultural differences do emerge, it is between local lobbyists and managers of American companies who assume U.S. lobbying tactics are transferable and bark orders to their lobbyists across the phone-line. And it’s not just unrealistic demands to kill legislation.

“The Americans tend to nickel-and-dime their EU operations,” Stevens said. “Most of our work is around policy directions and the day-to-day involvement is boring, technical regulatory stuff. This is not the place where you get quick results.”

Wes Himes, managing partner of lobby firm Instinctif, agreed that any transatlantic cultural differences are a result of differences in the lie of the institutional land.

“In the U.S. often lobbyists are identified as Republican or Democrat,” Himes said — a model that would not work in Brussels, where the bulk of lobbying efforts involve technical discussion with unelected and non-political officials. “And, of course, there is the role of campaign finance [in the U.S.], which often renders lobbyists as campaign fundraisers as much as policy advocates.”

Yet the question of whether cultural elements play any part at all in the differences between Brussels and Washington is one that continues to fascinate observers — to the point that academics have spent time comparing interactions between lobbyists and legislators in the hope of finding answers.

University of Amsterdam researcher Marcel Hanegraaff compared and contrasted U.S. and EU lobbyists at climate conferences at the World Trade Organization to see if culture played a part in the ability to secure an outcome.

Hanegraaff found that there were indeed “clear differences — ranging from the Americans’ preference for contract lobbyists (EU companies prefer to keep things in-house) and the sheer size of lobbying budgets on either side of the Atlantic (U.S. lobbyists have substantially more cash to splash).

Yet according to Hanegraaff, the extent to which these differences are linked to culture remains a difficult question to answer. “The cultural effect should not be overstated,” Hanegraaff said. “Differences are more driven by adaptation towards the institutional structure of the EU and U.S.”