A New System for Measuring Regulatory Robustness: A Necessary and Sufficient Conditions Approach.

Lobbying regulations have proliferated rapidly since the turn of the century, at all levels of governance. Alongside these policy developments, scholars have attempted to ‘grade’ or measure the ‘robustness’ of lobbying regulations, defined as the level of transparency and accountability that these policy instruments can guarantee (Crepaz, 2016). However, existing measures such as those developed or employed by Newmark (2005), Holman and Luneburg (2012), or Chari et al. (2010; 2019) find difficulty in measuring the notion of robustness effectively. For example, oftentimes, two states with little to no overlap in which activities, actors, or arenas they capture can be graded as similarly robust, despite having little in common. Such issues are largely the result of a mismatch between the objective of measuring robustness and the tools available to do so, with existing measures relying solely on necessary conditions and cumulative points-based structures. This causes issues of equivalence when comparative research is being undertaken, while also introducing difficulties for systems of governance that seek to understand what a ‘good’ lobbying regulation is when considering the enactment of their own. As such, developing a more accurate system of measuring robustness that considers both necessary and sufficient conditions will benefit the theory and practice of the field. Drawing on existing measures of robustness and feeding from the in-practice structures of lobbying regulations and registers in multiple settings, this paper develops a new measure that paints a clearer picture of the comparative regulatory robustness of lobbying regulations by applying it in a comparative manner. Disaggregating the components of lobbying regulations into the categories of baseline necessary ‘needs’ and optional ‘wants’ provides that similarly scored systems do not necessarily obtain equivalence, while also seeing fit that basic requirements of regulatory robustness are considered before labelling it as a regulation of a certain strength. Furthermore, by considering the interfaces of registers themselves and not only the text of legal regulations, this new system considers the availability of data published and how individuals may consume it, establishing additional granularity within the measure while also considering how these regulatory tools function in-practice, as well as on paper. By developing this new measure of regulatory robustness, this paper contributes to our understanding of comparative lobbying regulations, while also speaking to the broader need to consider more fully the necessary and sufficient conditions of public policies when thinking about how stringent they are and how they compare to others. Additionally, by considering the structures established lobbying regulations, this measure seeks to develop itself as a globally applicable measure, moving beyond the US-centricity of existing tools, allowing scholars and practitioners of lobbying regulations to more fully grasp the strengths of weaknesses of existing regulations when researching these policy tools or seeking to learn from them as a means to design new regulations.