Examining Interest Groups’ Support for a Mandatory EU Transparency Register: the Importance of Access and Regulatory Experience

The European Commission has recently proposed a reform of the EU lobbying regulation regime and the introduction of a mandatory Transparency Register that would cover both the Parliament and the Council. In an unprecedented move, the Council agreed in late 2017 for its General-Secretariat to join this regulatory regime. We ask a fundamental question about this important policy development: to what extent was this regulatory reform supported and informed by the policy preferences of private actors who are its main regulatory targets? We answer by building on theories of regulatory regime design and change and distinguish between measures aimed at defining the regime orientation (scope) and those structuring the regime organization (Vogel 1996). We argue that interest groups’ first hand experience with the regulatory regime explains their support (or lack thereof) for the proposed reform. Specifically, we expect that on measures related to regime orientation, interest groups that experienced frequent access to policymakers are more likely to support expanding the regulatory scope of the Transparency Register to cover more organizational entities and institutional actors. On measures linked to how the regulatory regime is organized and implemented, organizations with frequent access are more likely to support maintaining the status quo and to recommend only incremental improvements of technical aspects of the regulatory regime. We test our argument on a new dataset that provides detailed information about interest groups’ policy positions regarding the proposed reform of EU lobbying regulation and about their level of direct access to top European officials. Our study reveals significant differences in preferences for regulation of EU lobbying between interest groups with various levels of direct access to EU policymakers. We contribute to the literature on interest groups’ participation in EU policymaking and regulatory governance, while providing important insights to the sparse literature on lobbying regulation in national and supranational systems of government.