Abstract
The wave of attempts at lobbying regulation at national levels in Europe over the last decade highlights an increasing interest on the side of policy-makers to propose rules for lobbying in the context of a crisis of trust in political representatives. However, these initiatives lead to a paradox: Public and private actors want to be seen as supporting lobbying regulation, yet these same actors often contribute to the ineffectiveness and lack of implementation of the regulations. What is at stake for these actors when lobbying regulations are drafted and negotiated? Based on an interpretive policy analysis of the lobbying regulation processes initiated by governments in Poland (2003–2005) and the Czech Republic (2011–2013), the article shows how decisions about the design of the core policy instruments of lobbying regulations, registers of lobbyists and reporting obligations, contribute to shaping the institutional framework of state–society relations.
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Notes
The OECD is an international organization with 35 member states worldwide, including the United States. It aims to foster prosperity and economic growth and help fight poverty through providing policy expertise and advice and creating conditions for multilateral oversight of policy implementation. There are now 16 OECD countries regulating lobbying, as opposed to only four before 2005. Those having adopted regulations since are Poland, Hungary, Israel, France, Mexico, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Chile, United Kingdom and Ireland.
The policy processes analyzed cover the years 2003–2005 for Poland and 2011–2013 for the Czech Republic.
Five interviews with public officials involved in lobbying regulation in the Czech Republic done over the period of 2011–2015 and six in Poland (2013–2015). The transcripts of Special Parliamentary Commission meetings from the Polish case can be found here: http://orka.sejm.gov.pl/SQL.nsf/pracekom4?OpenAgent&NDL. The Czech inter-ministerial consultation documents can be found here: https://apps.odok.cz/veklep-detail?p_p_id=material_WAR_odokkpl&p_p_lifecycle=0&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-1&p_p_col_count=3&_material_WAR_odokkpl_pid=RACK8YBC8V24&tab=remarks.
In short, an interdependency between political parties and business elites settled in since the 1990s, with political parties securing public contracts for entrepreneurs or granting them advantageous conditions of privatization, while the entrepreneurs in turn supplied the new parties with financial resources and reserved places for party representatives or high-ranking officials on the companies’ supervisory boards (Schoenman 2005, pp. 54–60). The communist rule also negatively impacted the relationship of citizens to the state and to legal order (Gadowska 2006), while developing a strong reliance on informal networks and practices for the provision of goods (Krastev 2002), including by way of intermediaries.
The fact, for instance, that most of the local companies do not outsource lobbying does not seem to be specific to the CEE (Heinz et al. 1993, p. 67); neither does the fact that the vast majority of lobbyists has an experience from politics or administration (cf. Heinz et al. 1993, p. 114; Schlozman and Tierney, 1986, p. 269) and that most can be identified, as individuals, with a particular political party (Heinz et al. 1993, pp. 79–80). Also, one of the main preoccupations of lobbyists-for-hire seems to be the negotiation of the evaluation of one´s work with the client—efforts destined at ‘making clients happy’, including by unnecessary ‘show-horse meetings’ (Kersh 2002, p. 235).
The juxtaposition of the Polish and Czech attempts at regulation with those at the level of the European Union or the OECD does not suggest causal links in cases of co-occurrence. The role of a circulation of regulation norms and models in national-level lobbying regulations constitutes another part of the author’s research.
See http://bip.mon.gov.pl/dzialalnosc-urzedu/artykul/dzialalnosc-lobbingowa/dziaania-lobbingowe-w-mon-10246/ for the yearly reports on lobbying activities published by ministries.
These three conditions largely correspond to John Kingdon’s theory of agenda-setting as occurring when three streams intersect: the problem stream, the policy stream and the political stream (Kingdon 1984).
In the Polish Parliament, a Special Commission is equal to a committee, but created ad hoc for a particular bill, especially in cases where a bill is transversal in its character. The Special Commission on lobbying was operating from 29th January 2004 to 5th July 2005.
With all necessary reserve taken towards the use of opinion polls as scientific proof, the negative perception of activities labelled as ‘lobbying’ may be read from repeated polls on the relation between interest groups and the state and from polls on the state of corruption conducted by the main public opinion research institutes (CBOS 2010, 2013; CVVM 2013a, b).
Interestingly, trade unions were absent in both cases from the roundtables (CZ) or Commission meetings (POL) on lobbying regulation and their contribution can only be found in the Czech case in their written response in the inter-ministerial consultations of the draft bill, where they ask to be exempted from the regulation using similar arguments as the business associations.
After all, legislation has been recognized in political sociology as a prime tool for the state to act upon meanings, distinctions, and the status of actors and practices in society (Lagroye et al 2012, pp. 447–448).
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This study was supported by the Charles University project GA UK No. 1790214 (‘Lobbying, a real profession? The Countours of Professionalization and the Institutionalization of Lobbying in Central Europe’).
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Vargovčíková, J. Inside lobbying regulation in Poland and the Czech Republic: negotiating public and private actors’ roles in governance. Int Groups Adv 6, 253–271 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-017-0026-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-017-0026-9