Dining, Dancing, Drinking: Regulating Informal Channels of Interest Group Influence?

Though informal meetings between politicians and interest group representatives may be an important channel of interest group influence, there is surprisingly little systematic research in the social sciences on this interesting dimension of politics. Hence, the first part of this paper conceptualizes which contacts between politicians and interest groups actually belong to the informal political sphere. Moreover, we examine when such informal contacts become a problem in democratically organized societies. Against this background, the second part of this paper focusses on the governance issue of whether informal channels of interest group influence should be regulated somehow (e.g., via a lobbying register including informal meetings). The main argument of this paper is that in the context under investigation one should not have too high expectations of the effectiveness of such formal regulations – however, there are complementary mechanisms to ‘police’ the informal political sphere: self-policing by politicians and political parties, policing by third-party watchdogs (i.e., investigative media, judicial authorities, non-governmental watchdog organizations), and policing by citizen-voters. The presented analytical framework may be used in in-depth case studies to investigate whether the governance arrangements under which informal contacts take place in particular real-world societies are appropriate to detect cases of misconduct.