Redesigning Transparency and Stakeholders’ Participation in EU Policymaking: Understanding the Reform of the Joint Transparency Register

Regulating lobbying and the access of interest groups to policymaking is a key yet contentious issue in the debates over democratic legitimacy and policy effectiveness. Generally defined as a soft regulatory system, the EU regime of lobbying regulation has recently undergone a set of reforms aimed at the restructuring of the Joint Transparency Register and the reporting of interactions between top Commission officials and interest organizations (January 2015). This reform process involved organizing a broad open consultation with interest groups and setting up a Working Group consisting of Commission and European Parliament officials. In relation to this reform process the research asks the following: what explains the policy outputs of this reform process? To answer this, the study builds on distributional approaches to rational choice institutionalism and elaborates a theoretical framework arguing that the redesign of the main instrument of regulating lobbying in the EU reflects to a larger extent the inter-institutional balance of power between the Commission and the Parliament and less the policy demands articulated by its end-users, namely the European interest groups. This argument is tested empirically on an original dataset providing detailed information about the key public and private actors involved in the revision process in terms of policy positions, resource-endowment and organizational characteristics. With the help of Item Response Theory (IRT) models and statistical analysis, the study models statistically and explains the outcomes of the review process. The findings indicate that the policy changes and the more stringent regulatory regime of EU lobbying introduced following this review reflect to a larger extent the strategic considerations of institutional actors regarding policy entrepreneurship and enhancing their bargaining power during legislative decision-making, than their responsiveness to private actors’ demands for specific policy measures.