What explains the recent wave of adoption of lobby registers among developed countries? In a contribution to a Politics and Governance special issue, we show that the interaction of corruption and economic development as well as the internationally promoted anti-corruption policy agenda by the OECD and the European Commission explain the adoption of such registers. We argue that against a background of low to moderate levels of corruption and a level of GDP per capita around $20,000-40,000, governments are most likely to adopt lobby registers as there is a public demand for reducing corruption. We support our argument with a regression analysis based on a sample of 42 OECD members and partners countries. Furthermore, we qualitatively trace the process of regulating lobbying in Italy and Slovenia. Both countries are similar as public opinion perceived lobbying in a negative way as associated with the undue influence of powerful interest groups, regulatory capture, and eventually corruption. Therein, we observe that anti-corruption agenda promotion by international organizations is crucial and that the institutionalization of anti-corruption agency (in the case of Slovenia) or the window of opportunity opened by an unusual political coalition of reformers (in the case of Italy) abated the political resistance to legitimizing lobbying. The combination of the two empirical analyses shows that internationally promoted anti-corruption agenda is more likely to be adopted in middle-income countries with a large and growing middle class. Further, the case study of Slovenia shows that the adoption of lobbying regulation can be facilitated also by framing lobbying as an activity that requires a certain level of professionalism. The latter is our recommendation to the international organization such as the EU and the OECD.

In the remainder of this commentary, we go beyond this description in a nutshell and aim to provide more details on the research design of our paper.

Our research puzzle is the initial wave of lobby register diffusion as 13 countries adopted lobby register between 2000 and 2015. This tool of transparency has been promoted by international organizations, especially by the EU and the OECD, as a way to prevent corruption. In fact, lobby registers allow citizens to monitor and hold accountable elected politicians helping them identify misconduct in the interaction between lobbyists and policymakers. This international influence is our starting posit that is confirmed by the observation that before the international organizations’ engagement with the anti-corruption agenda only four countries had a lobby register in place. Further, previous research has already demonstrated that this international influence matters (Crepaz, 2017). As we take this international influence for granted, our focus is on the domestic factors translating the input from international organizations into national policies.

Our main argument for explaining the adoption of lobby registers is that level of corruption is moderated by the level of economic development in a given country. Policymakers will be particularly responsive to middle-class citizens’ demands to reduce corruption if domestic economic development has resulted in improved working conditions, education and public services (Biswas & Vijaya, 2019). This process is likely to happen in EU and OECD member states, which have some level of corruption but strive to maintain their economic development and aim at being in good standing with the practices and emerging standards of IOs. In such contexts, citizens and civil society organizations are likely to monitor and sanction the behavior of elected officials and interest groups (Elster, 1998, p. 1) and to promote the adoption of international norms (Borz, 2019), as they aim at maintaining democratic standards and economic prosperity (Biswas & Vijaya, 2019). Empirically, this mechanism implies that the interaction between the size of the economy and the level of corruption should impact positively on the adoption of lobby registers. We tested this main argument against several other explanations such as countries’ civil society structure, bicameralism, age of democracy, foreign direct investment, and geographical proximity to previous adopters.

Methodologically, we chose the logit model amongst the possible Event History Analysis models. We also control for time. We complement the statistical analysis with two case studies of Italy and Slovenia that have different configurations of corruption and economic development but have the same outcome of adopting a lobby register.

The statistical results show that the co-occurrence of corruption and a higher GDP per capita make it more likely that policymakers will adopt a lobby register. However, the following graphical representation of the results attests that countries with low to moderate levels of corruption and low to moderate levels of economic development are most likely to adopt lobby registers. Precisely, in countries with low levels of corruption and a level of GDP around $20,000—$40,000 per capita, policymakers are more likely to adopt lobby registers than in countries with high corruption and low economic development or in countries with high economic development and low corruption.

Fabrizio De Francesco is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the University of Heidelberg, University of Lausanne, and University of Leiden. His research on regulatory institutions, the diffusion of administrative reform, and transnational governance has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Public Administration, and Socio-Economic Review.