Lobbying is a natural, important and legitimate part of the democratic process. In theory, lobbying activities lead to better decision-making and ensure that different interests have a voice. Lobbying is also perceived as a communication channel based on the exchange of information. However, sometimes lobbying practices go beyond the legitimate representation of interests, and methods are deceptive. This kind of behavior is usually non-transparent and unfairly influences political processes. A key tool for ensuring a level playing field in the decision-making process, fostering control over democracy and ethical behaviour, as well as reduction corruption opportunities is transparency. The less transparent the decision-making process, the more corruptible the ruling government tends to be. The core of transparency is openness in the flow of economic, political and social information to the relevant stakeholders. Transparency is an essential feature of good governance. However, transparency is a rarely mentioned category in the research literature on measuring the quality of democracy. And if the concept of transparency actually appears in an indicator measuring the quality of democracy, it often focuses solely on the fundamental existence of basic elements. However, these elements are not evaluated deeply enough in terms of their characteristics and/or forms that reflect the quality of their mutual interactions. In other words, they focus only on the existence of a given phenomenon, e.g. whether the civil society groups, interest groups, journalists, and other citizens are able to comment on and influence pending policies or legislation, but it does not provide any other deeper observations about important features such as how the comments are proposed, what form this influence can take and according to which rules it can be conducted etc. The aim of the article is to identify links between indicators of quality of democracy and transparent lobbying and to clarify deeper aspects of the democratisation process in terms of interactions and exchange of information between stakeholders through accurate monitoring of much more precise indicators and elements of transparent lobbying. For that purpose, description, explanation, deduction, contextual analyses, and principle of theoretical sampling are used as the primary methods covered by the grounded theory method.
