Regulating lobbying

A global comparison, 2nd edition

Raj Chari, John Hogan, Gary Murphy, Michele Crepaz

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526117250
• eBook ISBN: 9781526117267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Governments worldwide are developing sunshine policies that increase transparency in politics, where a key initiative is regulating lobbyists. Building on the pioneering first edition, this book updates its examination of all jurisdictions with regulations, from the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Unlike any book, it offers unique insights into how the regulations compare and contrast against each other, offering a revamped theoretical classification of different regulatory environments and situating each political system therein. This edition innovatively considers different measurements to capture the robustness of lobbying laws in terms of promoting transparency and accountability. And, based on the authors' experience of advising governments globally, it closes with a no-nonsense guide on how to make a lobbying law. This is of value to policymakers seeking to introduce or amend regulations, and lobbyists seeking to influence this process.

1
Introducing Regulating lobbying

In the first edition we argued that while this book finds a niche within the broader scholarship on interest groups, it offers an innovative approach to the literature. This is because the work is concerned with comparing how lobby groups are formally regulated throughout the world and the impact this has had – something previously largely unexamined. The 2010 edition thus built on previous scholarship on lobbying regulation in Canada, the United States (US), the European Union (EU) and Germany, offering an in-depth, detailed analysis of this phenomenon from a global comparative perspective to include fuller examination of Europe, Australia, Asia and North America.¹

We highlighted that work carried out by interest groups (or lobby groups – we use the two terms interchangeably throughout the book) is a central and legitimate part of the democratic process within all liberal democratic systems. Yet, the term has often had negative connotations, even though the work of lobbyists is essential. Issues surrounding the openness of the policy-making process which may have been captured by specific interests therefore prompted countries to regulate the activities of lobbyists in order to increase transparency and accountability.

In less than a decade since the first edition, there has been a remarkable two-fold increase in the number of countries that have developed lobbying laws. This includes a number of jurisdictions in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, which now boast lobbying regulations. Subsequently, we have since seen significant contributions by scholars who have extended our initial research, including more nuanced analysis of jurisdictions either recently adopting lobbying regulations (Veksler, 2012; Verčič and Verčič, 2012; Thomas and Klimovich, 2014; Crepaz, 2016; Murphy, 2017; McGrath, 2017), or amending extant rules (Greenwood, 2011; Hogan et al., 2011; Kanol, 2012; Crepaz and Chari, 2014). Others have considered new methods of analysis to better measure the robustness of lobbying laws and classify lobbying environments (Holman and Luneburg, 2012; Veksler, 2015). From an academic vantage, there is thus a need to take account of what new ideas are being raised in the literature on the theme. From a practitioner vantage, we have also seen increased demands from different countries that are either recently formulating, or about to make, such laws asking for more guidance on how to develop or amend regulations.² Further, while the original book was indeed less preoccupied with private interests’ role and actions when specific policies are made, we realise a decade later that lobbyists reading our work have taken their deeper understanding of the ‘rules of the game’ as a basis to develop global lobbying strategies. Such actors are now consequently asking for an updated version of all the countries that have developed laws since 2008 in order to better understand the different regulatory environments in which they work.

As detailed more fully in the final section of this chapter, given these academic and practitioner demands, the second edition of this book has been written in order to transcend the state of the art in this growing field of research, with the view to also offering significant insights to academics and practitioners throughout the globe.

In the form of a brief recap, it is worth considering what is generally meant by the term lobbying regulation. A fundamental dimension of lobbying rules is that lobbyists must register with the state, usually an independent regulator, before contact is made with elected representatives and high-level civil servants and officials who they target. The legislation defines which lobbyists are regulated (such as consultancies, in-house corporate lobbyists, NGOs and professional associations) and which organisations may be exempt from registration (such as charities; lawyers, or accountants). The amount of information that lobbyists must disclose varies among jurisdictions with lobbying laws. This ranges from simply stating the name of the bill, ministry and official being targeted, to disclosing more detailed information on money spent on lobbying. The regulator generally publishes the registration information in an open online database, allowing citizens to access it and see who is lobbying whom and about what. If there is a breach of the rules – say that a lobbyist is found to be active without being registered – the regulator may impose sanctions such as fines or imprisonment. In order to prevent potential conflicts of interest, many lobbying laws also have revolving door (or cooling-off) provisions which stipulate the time period that public officials leaving office have to wait before entering the lobbying industry. The overall objective of lobbying regulation is the ‘imposition of some degree of transparency’ as well as a level of ethical standards and behaviours which ‘lobbyists are expected to comply with’ (OECD, 2009: 4).

One issue with the first edition was that we did not fully situate lobbying laws in comparative context with other open government policies such as Freedom of Information (FoI), Whistleblowing and Ethics Reform laws. Throughout the last seven years of our advising governments and political institutions which have either developed lobbying laws (the UK, Ireland and Scotland), or held parliamentary committees to study the pros and cons of lobbying laws (the Czech Republic, Serbia and the European Parliament), or outlined a series of recommendations or proposals on what should be in the nature of said laws (the Council of Europe and New South Wales, Australia), we realised that there is a need to place lobbying laws and their importance in terms of wider government initiatives to ‘clean up’ politics. In short, ‘who’ do lobbying laws regulate, and how should this be seen as different from FoI, Whistleblowing and Ethics Reform?

Before we answer this question, it is first necessary to clearly define terms: what is meant by the terms ‘lobby groups’ and ‘lobbying’, as well as the concept of regulation. We then offer a theoretical discussion of why regulating lobbyists is important, highlighting the importance of transparency and accountability, while presenting a balanced view of scholars who have considered its drawbacks. Following this, we see which jurisdictions have adopted lobbying legislation as of 2017, and when, underlining the rapid growth of such laws over the last decade. The final section outlines the four large questions that guide this book, demonstrating how they are linked to the objectives of each of the chapters.

Lobby groups, lobbying and regulation

Providing a working definition of ‘lobby groups’ and ‘lobbying’ is helpful at this early stage, for two main reasons. First, the definition of lobby groups clarifies who are the actors typically targeted by lobbying laws. Second, the definition of lobbying illustrates which activities fall into the scope of the regulation.

Yet, the literature demonstrates that the classification of such groups, and explaining what exactly lobbying is, has proved immensely difficult (see Greenwood and Thomas, 1998; Nownes, 2006: 5; Chari et al., 2010: 3; Scott, 2015). Developing cogent definitions of both ‘lobby group’ and ‘lobbying’ is not as easy as it might first appear. More importantly, it is necessary to also consider ‘cultural’ variations of the ‘perceptions’ of lobbying.

To define an ‘interest group’ or ‘lobby group’, different classification schemes have been used in the literature. For example, in a study on the EU, Watson and Shackleton (2003: 89) provided a useful typology to classify different types of lobby actors, distinguishing between bodies that promote private interests (i.e. that pursue specific economic goals) and those that promote public interests (i.e. that pursue non-economic aims). Chari and Kritzinger (2006) extended this by considering three types of groups: economic groups (including individual corporations and business organisations), professional groups (such as trade unions and farmers) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements and dedication
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introducing Regulating lobbying
• 2 Countries with laws in the 1900s
• 3 Countries with laws in the first decade of the 2000s
• 4 Countries with laws in the 2010s
• 5 Comparative analysis of robustness measures
• 6 How to make a lobbying law: lessons for states and lobbyists
• 7 Conclusion
• References and further reading
• Index