Regulating lobbying through voluntary transparency clubs: The connoisseurs’ assessment. Evidence from the European Union
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12594 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Adriana Bunea,Vlad Gross |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Regulating lobbying through voluntary
transparency clubs: The connoisseurs’assessment.
Evidence from the European Union
Adriana Bunea
1
| Vlad Gross
2
1
Department of Comparative Politics,
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
2
Department of Political Science, University
of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
Correspondence
Adriana Bunea, Department of Comparative
Politics, University of Bergen, Christies gate
15, Bergen, Hordaland, 5020 Norway.
Email: adriana.bunea@uib.no
Regulating private actors’participation in policy-making is
key to democratic governance. Across political systems,
targeted transparency is used to regulate lobbying activities.
We examine the extent to which primary regulatory targets
(organizations with frequent access to policy-makers) sup-
port the architecture of lobbying regulation regimes set up
as voluntary transparency clubs. Our empirical testing
ground is the European Union. We conceptualize the EU
Transparency Register as a Voluntary Transparency Club,
elaborate on its club goods, and derive a set of theoretical
expectations about its members’evaluations of the club’s
transparency standards, membership size, and monitoring
and enforcement mechanisms. We find significant differ-
ences between members’and non-members’assessment
regarding the regulatory performance of this transparency
club. Members with frequent access to executive policy-
makers criticize the club’s transparency standards and do
not consider the Register a useful regulatory instrument.
Yet, they support expanding its regulatory remit and
increasing the club membership.
1|INTRODUCTION
Regulating interest groups’participation in policy-making constitutes an indispensable prerequisite for transparent,
accountable and legitimate democratic government. Across political systems, different regulatory regimes are used
to manage lobbying and private actors’interactions with decision-makers. These regimes vary in regulatory strin-
gency and instruments, but they all have the same goal: increasing the amount of public information about interac-
tions between public and private actors, and the latter’s attempts to shape and influence decision-making (Holman
Received: 6 October 2018 Revised: 20 February 2019 Accepted: 5 March 2019
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12594
Public Administration. 2019;97:797–813. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 797
and Luneburg 2012). Lobbying regulation thus constitutes a form of social disclosure policy in which the costs of reg-
ulation are concentrated on the private actors that disclose information publicly, while the benefits are widely dis-
persed across the general public (Bunea 2018). A classic argument made in the literature on the politics of regulation
is that an uneven distribution of regulatory costs and benefits usually leads regulated actors to systematically oppose
and criticize the regulatory regime (Wilson 1980).
For lobbying regulation, this argument holds true especially for those interest organizations seeking frequent
access to decision-makers. For them, lobbying regulation is highly salient since it may create additional access bar-
riers, registration costs and administrative hurdles. However, the more recent literature on transparency and infor-
mation disclosure as a regulatory policy indicates that the regulated targets ‘often end up supporting’regulatory
regimes that are based on disclosure of public information (Graham 2002, p. 140). Reputational concerns, a motiva-
tion to avoid more excessive forms of regulation or an interest in increasing the amount of information ‘about their
competitors and potential partners’may contribute towards increasing the motivation of regulated actors to endorse
and support lobbying regulatory systems that entail information disclosure (De Fine Licht and Naurin 2016, p. 222).
We examine this theoretical puzzle in the case of the EU lobbying regulation regime, a system of governance
relying exclusively on information disclosure and targeted transparency to regulate interest groups’participation in
policy-making with the help of a Transparency Register (TR) (Smismans 2014). We ask, to what extent do interest
groups with frequent access to decision-makers support the architecture of the EU lobbying regulation system and
its further institutionalization recently proposed by the European Commission? We focus analytically on organiza-
tions with frequent access to high-level officials in the EU executive body. We build conceptually on a well-
established line of research exploring private actors’access to policy-makers and institutional venues as a key
(explanatory or dependent) variable in studies of lobbying and executive politics (Beyers 2004; Eising 2007;
Binderkrantz et al. 2015; Dür and Mateo 2016). We contribute to this literature by investigating the effect of fre-
quent access to policy-makers on private actors’expressed preferences on specific policy issues. Specifically, we
examine how access levels shape actors’perceptions of and preferences for a certain design of lobbying regulation.
We consider these actors to be analytically and empirically different from policy insiders, which denote a structurally
more sophisticated and powerful category of stakeholders than those with frequent access to decision-makers.
1
Organizations with frequent access to high-level Commission officials are in our view in a uniquely interesting
and relevant position to evaluate EU lobbying regulation. First, they have a high stake in its regulatory design and
enforcement mechanisms since they directly incur the costs of information disclosure. They are legitimate ‘affected
actors’(Fung 2013). By having frequent direct access to the regulatory agenda-setter, they are in a unique position
to advise on and potentially shape the structuring of the regulatory regime as ‘prominent’affected actors (Halpin and
Fraussen 2017). Second, they have extended direct experience with the regime and have developed in-depth knowl-
edge about its dynamics, following repeated interactions with decision-makers within the boundaries of this regula-
tory framework. They are thus ‘the best source of information’for decision-makers, which should give them ‘a
degree of leverage over regulatory arrangements’and proposed regulatory reforms (Knill and Lenschow 2004). Third,
they are key players in the successful implementation of the regime since they are actors that must comply with its
requirements. Organizations with frequent access are both competent and highly interested to perform a systematic
evaluation of the EU lobbying regulation status quo and reform. Their evaluation provides valuable insights into how
existing regulatory measures balance the public interest against private actors’costs of regulatory compliance, con-
tribute to good governance by ensuring proportionate regulation and succeed in providing positive public externali-
ties by reducing the risk of corruption and biased representation in policy-making.
Understanding these key actors’positions on matters of supranational lobbying regulation is essential given the
high stake of regulating private actors’participation in policy-making for the legitimacy and accountability of the EU
1
Bunea (2017, p. 58; 2018, p. 393) presents a compelling discussion of this distinction, arguing that policy insiders are actors enjoying a special (structural)
status in EU policy-making because they possess several distinctive characteristics: they are part of exclusive consultations forums, have immediate and
direct access to policy-makers, possess a broad representative mandate and have a keen and consistent interest in certain policy issues, becoming key
actors in policy networks articulated in specific policy areas. Insiders possess more relevant features than just frequent access to policy-makers.
798 BUNEA AND GROSS
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