The stakes of "making visible" in lobbying regulations. The case of attempts at regulating lobbying in the Czech Republic
Abstract
Public policies based on targeted transparency have made their way into the repertoire of policy instruments mobilized by public authorities, especially when they address the activities of private actors. In particular, during the last decade, states across Europe have tried to adopt policies to regulate lobbying, that is, mostly non-public and non-institutionalized attempts by private actors to influence public decision-making.
As different as their national contexts may be, policy-makers have been opting for strikingly similar policy instruments and tools when constructing lobbying as a policy issue (registers of lobbyists, reporting of clients, contacts, income, etc.), with transparency constituting their very core. What, however, is the public to see, in the end, of the activities of lobbying? If the regulations propose to make visible activities conducted behind the scenes, usually as a policy reaction to corruption/lobbying scandals that have "thrown open to view" relations and acts that were to remain unseen by the public, under what mode are these transparency policies making them visible? Taking lobbying regulations as its empirical material, the paper thus aims to offer a conceptualization of how transparency policies more generally modify the patterns of political visibility.