Associational Self-Regulation: A Foundation for Effective and Efficient Lobbying Regulation

While governments frequently regulate trades and business practices, there are limits to which lobbying and advocacy can be controlled. This is especially true in the United States where lobbying is understood to be a constitutional right and thus protected by the courts from any significant regulation. I therefore propose that the lobbying profession regulate itself through a set of codes of ethics and good conduct. The United States has a long tradition of professional self-regulation that keeps the coercive hand of state power limited, and therefore largely invisible, and thus makes practitioners more comfortable with being regulated. In this paper I explore this history, compare how associational self-regulation is done in the professions of architecture, medicine, accounting, and law, and then propose how it might be done for lobbying. Attention is also given to recent efforts in California to create general procedures of good conduct for lobbyists and lawmakers. The paper ends by proposing a model of how self-regulation of the lobbying profession might actually work, a model that is arguably flexible enough to be applied in modified form to self-regulate lobbying communities in Europe or in a representative democracy.