Inside the Lobbying Regulation Processes in Europe: Negotiating Public and Private Actors Roles in Governance
Abstract
A wave of attempts at lobbying regulation at national levels in Europe over the last decade prompts a thorough analysis of what is at stake when political entrepreneurs put lobbying on the agenda and when policy design is being discussed. More fundamentally, we argue, if analyzed as policy processes, these attempts at regulation reveal what the perceptions of lobbying by decision-makers are at a time when the involvement of various private actors in policy-making is on the increase at different levels of governance, affecting not only the status of private actors, but the one of public actors as well.
Based on an interpretive policy analysis of the lobbying regulation processes initiated by governments in Poland (2003-2005) and the Czech Republic (2011-2013), we show how the decisions about the design of the core policy instruments of lobbying regulations, registers of lobbyists and reporting obligations, contribute to shaping the institutional framework of state-society relations, with both neopluralist and neocorporatist assumptions confronting each other, but with the stakes of designing this framework transformed by the more recent requirement of transparency as a basis for public accountability that impacts on both private and public actors in policy-making.