It is important for policy makers and public to understand the real positions of various stakeholders in the policy making process. To this end, data from the EU Transparency Register and the Orbis database was already combined to construct a multiplex lobby network [1]. In this study we make a step further, and analyze actual responses of lobby organizations to public consultations [2]. In particular, we collected data about 565 lobby organizations that are registered in the EU Transparency Register, and that responded to 21 public consultations in the area of Banking and Finance, from June 2014 to November 2017. Three aspects of the lobbyists are analyzed: (i) their formal categorization in the Transparency Register, (ii) their self-declared goals and activities, and (iii) their actual responses to the public consultations. We construct a similarity network w.r.t. their interests in specific consultations, and asses the responses in terms of their co-voting similarities. We find that these preference patterns add a crucial dimension to understand the engagement of the lobbyists in the policy making process. A web application, Lobby Profile Explorer (https://kt.ijs.si/lobby/), supports interactive exploration of the lobby network and pairwise comparison of responses by the organizations.
