Legitimacy through targeted transparency?: regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

• Autores: Adriana Bunea
• Localización: European journal of political research, ISSN 0304-4130, ISSN-e 1475-6765, Vol. 57, Nº. 2, 2018, págs. 378-403
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimateand accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with thedemocratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solutionto increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulationregime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining i t andcomplying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency-based regulatoryregimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as alegitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Dostakeholders perceive the transparency-based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form ofregulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency andproposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluatethe legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The ndings describe atransparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizenscriticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register’s performance as a transparency instrument.The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups aboutsupranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benets oftransparency, but identify few organisation-level benets. Organisations that are policy insiders incur moretransparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategiesand does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in theRegister’s regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfectregulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support i ncreased transparency andinformation disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountableand l egitimate supranational lobbying