Abstrakt
Far from being limited to Brussels, professional lobbying has also taken root at national levels, developing from scratch in post-communist countries. Interest groups have hired lobbyists as intermediaries between the private and public spheres.
Therefore, when lobbyists seek to acquire the status of profession, their quest seems inseparable from a quest for a legitimate role in political decision-making. Does the professionalization of lobbying, then, represent a challenge to the existing governance patterns? Under the perspective of the sociology of professions, based on a corpus of semi-structured interviews with Polish and Czech lobbyists and a study of the two markets, the paper proposes to explore this double character of the professionalization of lobbying.
It argues that when lobbyists engage in professional mobilization and, therefore, self-justification in relation to decision-makers and the general public, they end up engaging in political legitimation, by virtue of the fact that they are brought to seek a status on grounds where the rules that apply are the rules of political legitimacy. Partly by an effect of spill-over of the process of professionalization, then, when lobbyists claim the unity and boundaries of their occupation, specific competence and special knowledge, as well as public utility, they tend to contest the roles and competence of the public officials and elected representatives in the policy-making process.
As the paper shows, this is in part due to the dynamics of the process of professionalization, but also to the proximity of the careers and profiles of lobbyists to the public sphere.