Lobby regulation beyond transparency: Identifying lobby regulation objectives and assessing their impact

Lobbying is often portrayed as an "insider game", with "wheeling and dealing" happening behind the scenes in informal meetings with decision-makers. As this often is the dominant frame in media coverage of lobbying activities at the national and EU level, often fueled by lobby (or even corruption) scandals, it is no surprise that many proposals to regulate lobbying strongly focus on increasing the transparency of policy processes and providing more information on the interactions between lobbyists and members of parliament and government officials. The underlying assumption of lobbying as backstage behaviour that violates the public interests typically results in a focus on (ever) more spotlights. The idea of such spotlights is that transparency disciplines behaviour, thereby decreasing potentially illegitimate actions and offering more opportunities for political and public control. In this paper, we develop and test a novel conceptual framework that aims to move this debate forward by considering the multiple possible objectives of lobby regulation. Our framework is built on three premises. First, it is attentive to this dual nature of interest representation, by considering both organizational dynamics and political activities. Second, while much lobbying regulation focuses on the input phase, our framework considers the input, throughput, and output phase of public decision-making. Third, we consider the role of both lobbyists and policymakers, as effective regulation requires attention to their joint responsibility. Combined, these three premises result in a framework relating different regulatory objectives to distinct regulatory instruments. We test the analytical leverage of our framework based on comparative survey data on perceived effectiveness of various lobby regulations.