Regulating Lobbying through Policy Networks

Interest groups’ participation in politics and policymaking represents a key feature of democratic systems of government. Regulating lobbying activities represents an essential instrument of ensuring legitimacy and accountability of decision-making. This is especially important in supranational, multi-level systems of governance where decision-making processes may lack immediate, direct public scrutiny such as the European Union. Interest groups’ preferences for the type and strength of the regulatory regime vary greatly across interest type and organizational form: some support a voluntary scheme that consists mainly in making public information about lobbying activities, meetings and campaigns across policy areas, while others demand a formal and strictly regulated regime of lobbying activities. This study examines this variation and asks the following question: what factors explain interest groups’ preferences for different types of regimes regulating the interactions between decision-makers and interest organizations in the EU system of governance? Building on theories of network governance and social network analysis, the study examines the effect of an interest group’s location within the policy community of stakeholders involved in the redesign of EU system of governance in the recent on its levels of satisfaction with the Transparency Register. Empirically, the study builds on an original dataset and examines with the help of regression analysis the effect of private actors’ relative placement within policy networks formally engaged in deliberative and decision-making processes on issues of EU governance on these actors’ evaluation of the register, while controlling for other explanatory factors such as their organizational characteristics and level of lobbying resources.