How, When, and Why? A comparative analysis of lobbyists’ consumption of lobbying register data to inform advocacy strategies in pluralist, corporatist, and statist states

Since the turn of the millennium, lobbying regulations and transparency registers have proliferated rapidly across democratic political systems. Lobbying registers are now found to be operating in states whose interest intermediation structures can be characterised as either more pluralist, corporatist, or statist, respectively. As such, ‘robust’ lobbying registers - which capture and render public a wide range of information on the previously hidden ‘black box’ of the lobbying process - stand as a potential ‘Google for lobbyists’ in the jurisdictions in which they operate. In this light, lobbying regulations may be perceived not only as a regulatory hurdle, but also as a resource in and of themselves for lobbyists to draw from. However, exceedingly little is known about how lobbyists may engage strategically with the information published on lobbying registers, beyond the registration of their organisation’s advocacy efforts. Furthermore, interest group research remains heavily focused on more pluralist contexts, leaving under-explored the variation that may exist in more corporatist or statist contexts where interest groups play a different role and lobbyists face alternative opportunities to engage with the policy-making process. Drawing on original cross-national survey data and elite interviews conducted with registered lobbyists from interest groups in three EU Member States with ‘robust’ lobbying registers (Ireland (pluralist), Germany (corporatist), and France (statist)), this study explores how, when, and why lobbyists consume the information published on lobbying registers to inform their advocacy strategies and decisions. This study’s comparative cross-national design argues that interest intermediation structure matters for how lobbying registers are engaged with during the policy-making process. Lobbyists in these (more pluralist, corporatist, and statist) state contexts operate in environments where their relationship with the state differs by virtue of the interest intermediation structure in place. As such, lobbyists operating in alternative legislative arenas may be credibly motivated to engage with the data captured by lobbying registers in strategically and temporally different ways. Other factors such as financial resources, advocacy capacity, and group type, also highlight that within each state, there exists variation in how this data is consumed as an advocacy resource. This research makes a significant contribution to the study of lobbying regulation and interest groups more generally by moving beyond the more traditional, single-context, and pluralist bubble of research when employing lobbying registers as a point of interest. By understanding how alternative state contexts encourage alternative behaviours of register data consumption, this paper is among the first to examine how such policy structures operate in practice, and in turn, how they may be employed as a source of information and assistance to those very actors they intend to regulate.