The (Ir)relevance of Lobbying Regulations for Commercial Lobbyists’ Profiles and Publicity

Across Europe, a significant number of lobbying regulations have appeared over the last two decades, introducing into legislation, usually for the first time, a definition of ‚lobbying‘ and of a ‚lobbyist‘, as well as obligations of transparency of the latter. The activities of lobbyists, previously specific by being non-public and non-institutionalized, thus became a legally recognized part of the policy-making process, under the condition that the identity of lobbyists, their clients and sometimes their expenses would regularly be reported to designated authorities. Whether this recognition and the transparency obligations have an impact on who becomes a commercial lobbyist and on the attitudes of lobbyists towards “going public” will be the object of this paper. Whereas in the case of the United States, the impacts of lobbying regulations on interest group landscape or the intensity of legislative activity have been studied at the federal and the state levels, studies on the impacts of the more recent rules on lobbying at the national levels in Europe remain scarce. The present paper contributes to filling this gap by analysing the structure of the population of commercial lobbyists in a context with regulation (Poland) compared to a context without regulation (Czech Republic), as well as by comparing the impact of regulation on the readiness of commercial lobbyists to speak publicly about their work. The two Central European countries thus represent very similar cases as per a number of political and socio-economic variables and differ as regards the existence of explicit rules and definitions for lobbying, Poland applying a law on lobbying since 2006 – long enough for a potential impact of regulation to become visible – and the Czech Republic having no such rules in force. The paper presents the results of a multiple correspondence analysis of eighty profiles of Czech and Polish commercial lobbyists described by eighteen variables related to their experience in the public and private sectors, their political experience, including their being registered or not in the Polish case, and being ready to speak publicly about their work, for the two. This is complemented by semi-structured interviews with Polish and Czech commercial lobbyists on their attitudes towards (and experience with) regulation. The results show that the mere existence of lobbying regulation only has a negligible impact on the types of profiles of commercial lobbyists, as well as on their readiness to become publicly identified as lobbyists and to speak about their work. However, significant differences in the relation to registration and to the publicity of lobbying appear inside each of the populations between individuals, mostly depending on their differing experience in the public and private sectors. The typology of commercial lobbyists in the Polish case thus practically overlaps with that of the Czech case. The paper confronts this relative irrelevance of regulations for the structuration of the lobbyist populations with diverging results of a recent study by Guillaume Courty on French commercial lobbyists.