A tale of two cities – exploring the role of private associations in the professionalisation of lobbying in Brussels and Washington D.C.

In the past few decades, lobbying in advanced democracies has been undergoing a process of professionalisation, whereby practitioners experience increased pressures for occupational specialisation, coupled with the emergence of a collective identity and the development of specific rules and normative principles that underscore the practice of lobbying. With professionalisation comes increased power. As ‘professional petitioners’ of government (Holyoke 2017, p. 274), lobbyists have become simultaneously more effective at shaping public policy-making and more difficult to control, both by those whose interests they represent (i.e., their clients) and by public regulators and watchdogs. Professional associations for lobbyists play an important role in addressing this challenge because they have the potential to exert quality control over practitioners. On the one hand, these bodies define the knowledge and skills expected from a professional lobbyist and can, through instruments such as certification programs, guarantee that individual practitioners meet technical competence criteria. On the other hand, professional associations formulate specific standards of conduct for practitioners, inculcate these standards through formalized codes, training and socialization, and impose sanctions for deviant behaviour. They can thus ensure that lobbyists both respect the rules of the democratic policy-making process and faithfully and diligently represent the interests of their clients. The paper explores the potential of professional associations to both control and legitimise the growing power of lobbyists by comparing the self-regulation work done by these types of bodies at the supranational level in Brussels, and at the federal level in Washington D.C. It asks how the distinctive political, institutional and regulatory environments in these jurisdictions have shaped both the incentives and the forms of professional self-regulation practised by lobbyists’ organisations. The comparison is justified because, as the ‘lobbying capitals’ of the world, Washington D.C. and Brussels represent most likely cases for lobby professionalisation. Not only do they attract high numbers of interest groups, owing to their extraordinary political significance, but they are also highly complex political systems, thereby requiring a high level of expertise from practitioners and offering the perspective of developing lobbying into a (life-long) career. The paper employs a qualitative methodology that combines document analysis and expert interviews. It adds to an evolving scholarly debate about the profession of lobbying and builds on a body of literature that contrasts interest group politics and lobbying in the EU and the US, which has not so far not centred regulatory matters, but has repeatedly demonstrated that institutional and cultural conditions on the two sides of the Atlantic shape lobbying and lobbyists in different ways.