The meaning of regulating lobbying. Regulation processes in the Czech Republic as negotiations of private and public actors' roles in policy-making
Abstract
In the recent decade, many European countries have attempted to propose and adopt policies of lobbying regulation, that is, lobbying being understood as a set of practices whereby private actors try to exert influence upon public decision-making. Among the first countries to have adopted such laws in Europe were post-communist countries.
The paper looks at one of them, the Czech Republic, where three unsuccessful attempts at regulation have taken place and examines these with the following question in mind: What is at stake when public actors try to regulate lobbying, what is really going on in these processes that helps us understand why they usually lead to policies that remain vague and lack implementation? The paper looks at the processes of lobbying regulation as policy processes where negotiations take place on issues transcending the sole practice of lobbying, namely the very distribution of roles and legitimacy between private and public actors. That is why an interpretive policy analysis of there processes is used in order to capture and track the construction and negotiations of meanings in these processes.
The main focus is on the selection of instruments and tools of regulation and their interpretation, as well as the deifnition of obligations to be imposed on the regulated entities as well as on public officials and members of parliament. It is based on an analysis of all the documents pertaining to these processes and on semi-structured interviews with public officials and MPs involved in these processes as well as with professional lobbyists.
Even though lobbying as a set of practices is by nature conservative in relation to the formal institutions and procedures of policy-making (using them, and accompanying them, rather than trying to change them), the debates about its regulation lead lobbyists to contest fundamentally the institutional roles of public officials and MPs and to claim a public legitimacy of their own in policy-making.