Fabrizio De Francesco and Philipp Trein
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.
This finding supports our main argument that under the presence of low to moderate corruption and significant but not very high economic development, policymakers are likely to adopt lobby registers. Such measures signal to citizens that transparency and the reduction of corruption are important policy goals. Further, these reforms indicate to IOs and companies that the country abides by emerging standards of good governance.
The case studies of Slovenia and Italy illustrate how these countries complied with the anti-corruption standards of adopting a lobby register. In both countries the framing of anti-corruption was essential. Slovenia adopted lobby registers through the national anti- corruption legislation based on a government bill, after two failed parliamentary initiatives aimed at passing overarching legislation on lobbying and public participation in law-making process. The influence of the EU and the OECD was important for shifting lobbying regulation onto the anti-corruption agenda after the failure of the National Assembly to regulate lobbying. The inclusion of lobbying within the anti-corruption legislation has been facilitated by the institutionalization of the Office of the Government for the Prevention of Corruption. This independent body accountable to the Parliament was the legislative drafter of the Slovenian anti-corruption policy that resulted in the adoption of the lobby register notwithstanding the inconsistent political support for the policy.
In Italy the registration system for lobbyists is fragmented as several constitutional bodies, such as the Chamber of deputies and several ministries and regions, independently adopted measures to regulate the influence of lobbyists and interest groups. These initiatives have filled the gap left by the 2012 anticorruption law that targets civil servants rather than elected officials. Through these separate initiatives it was possible to overcome the key barrier to adopting lobbying regulations, i.e., the low incentives for political parties to regulate their interaction with civil society and governments. As opposed to Slovenia, where the teaching of public relations has a long tradition (Fink-Hafner, 2017), this may be also due to the lack of recognized training and professionalization of Italian lobbyists (Petrillo, 2017). Further, the polarization of the anti-corruption agenda has not facilitated the formation of reform coalitions (Della Porta & Vannucci, 2007; Di Mascio, Maggetti, & Natalini, 2018), nor has there been a steady institutionalization of the anti-corruption policy (Piccio et al., 2014) as in Slovenia. The Italian lawmakers’ line of resistance to international pressure was weakened only during the technocratic governments and the 2013 electoral success of a new party, the Five Star Movement (Piccio et al., 2014). These unorthodox agents of reform were able to overcome the historical impossibility of forming reform coalitions in Italy.
Overall, we contribute to the literature of diffusion of tools to prevent corruption by focusing on the initial wave of adoption of lobby registers as a public governance standard. This focus allows us to draw a policy recommendation for international organizations. Although the EU and the OECD have correctly associated lobby registers with the issue of corruption, economic development moderates how corruption impacts on the adoption of lobby registers as it strengthens the middle-class that, in turn, puts pressure on political leaders to enhance transparency and combat corruption. The promotion of institutional solutions to combat corruption, such as lobby registers, may lead to symbolic adoption. To avoid such risk, international organizations should also frame lobbying regulation as a way to enhance the profession of public relations and lobbyists, as the case of Slovenia attests. A more comprehensive agenda framed around the conditions for ensuring more professional lobbying could transform the negative public perception of lobbying as a tool for channeling interest group positions, and, ultimately, achieving policy responsiveness to the general public.
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.
Philipp Trein is a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on comparative public policy, policy learning, federalism, and political economy. His book Healthy or Sick? Coevolution of Health Care and Public Health in a Comparative Perspective was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. More information on his research is available at https://www.philipptrein.com