Suchergebnisse

Eventually, an alternative attitude to lobbying regulation was settled. This is the model of lobbying activities poorly restricted by legal norms, when high publicity and transparency standards, ensured by internal rules, codes of ethics and analogous instruments of government institutions are applicable to the actions of lobbyists. Influential associated interest groups actively speak against the attempts, covered by the necessity of lobbying regulations, to restrict the initiatives of civil society, related to the objective to influence legislation. Lithuania failed to establish the explicitly and strictly legally regulated lobbying of the Anglo-Saxon type, though the Law on Lobbying is officially still in force. In this area our country should take the road chosen by the absolute majority of democratic countries and refuse altogether lobbying regulating lobbying under a special legal act.

Outside lobbying is a key strategy for social movements, interest groups and political parties for mobilising public opinion through the media in order to pressure policymakers and influence the policymaking process. Relying on semi-structured interviews and newspaper content analysis in six Western European countries, this article examines the use of four outside lobbying strategies – media-related activities, informing (about) the public, mobilisation and protest – and the amount of media coverage they attract. While some strategies are systematically less pursued than others, we find variation in their relative share across institutional contexts and actor types. Given that most of these differences are not accurately mirrored in the media, we conclude that media coverage is only loosely connected to outside lobbying behaviour, and that the media respond differently to a given strategy when used by different actors. Thus, the ability of different outside lobbying strategies to generate media coverage critically depends on who makes use of them.