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Why do we have lobbying rules? Investigating the introduction of lobbying laws in EU and OECD member states

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Abstract

Why do political systems introduce lobbying rules? Previous literature has analysed the determinants of the introduction of lobbying laws in the US states. However, the last 15 years have witnessed a booming popularity of lobbying laws across the world. Building upon the existing literature, this study seeks to explain the introduction of lobbying laws in EU and OECD member states from 1995 to 2014. The analysis considers variables related to the presence of lobbying scandals, the external promotion by international organizations and corporatism. The causal mechanisms follow the theoretical arguments developed in the literature on political agenda-setting effects, policy diffusion and theories of interest representation. The empirical investigation is based on an original dataset and a statistical investigation using event history analysis and multinomial regression models. The results suggest that policy diffusion variables influence the likelihood of passing lobbying laws. While scandals only affect the presentation of proposals for lobbying regulation in Parliament, corporatism shows no effects on the passage of such laws.

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Notes

  1. Allern et al. (2007) and Köppl and Wippersberg (2014) show that revolving doors between government and social partners is a characteristic feature of corporatist democracies.

  2. The data are truncated on the left, as no data are available before 1995. Nevertheless, only the USA, Germany and Canada had lobbying regulations in place before 1995 (the German and the American regulation dating back to the 1940s and 1950s). These omitted observations might cause a bias in the estimations. However, the size of the bias might be small as these lobbying laws were introduced many years before the reference year 1995.

  3. A more refined measurement could look at whether or not representatives of member states participated in the meetings organized by the EU in 2005 and the OECD in 2007 to formulate the policy recommendations. Unfortunately, the attendance of state representatives at these meetings is not recorded on the official documents and such measure cannot be constructed without a refined collection of data.

  4. See http://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview (last accessed 10 October 2015).

  5. However, in my sample only 9 out of 34 countries experience failure, while 25 countries exit the study period without having experienced the introduction of a lobbying law. This condition potentially violating the model’s assumption is referred to as ‘right censoring’ (a form of missing data problem). In my analysis, right censoring fortunately occurs because of a fixed-time condition and not because the number of studied events is fixed. The problem can therefore be resolved with an extension of the studied period in future studies because every country can experience the adoption of a lobbying law. The simple fact that the number of countries with lobbying regulations in place has more than doubled since 2007 adds strength to this conclusion.

  6. See http://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/VHG/XXIV/ME/ME_00293/imfname_223599.pdf, p. 1, last accessed 21 March 2017.

  7. See http://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/VHG/XXIV/ME/ME_00293/imfname_223599.pdf, p. 4, last accessed 21 March 2017.

  8. See http://www.per.gov.ie/en/regulation-of-lobbying/, last accessed 18 May 2016.

  9. For example, the USA is coded as 2 in the years 2007 and 2010 to indicate the amendments to the existing regulation of 1995.

  10. The variable index of perceived corruption is not included in the model specification because of missing data for the analysed countries. The results do not vary in model specifications that include this variable.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editor for their constructive comments. I would also like to thank Raj Chari, Jan Beyers and Gail McElroy for their suggestions on earlier versions of this work. Finally, I acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council, which funded this study.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin, 3 College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Michele Crepaz

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Crepaz, M. Why do we have lobbying rules? Investigating the introduction of lobbying laws in EU and OECD member states. Int Groups Adv 6, 231–252 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-017-0025-x

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