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AbstractDespite the growing interest for lobbying in public opinion research, little is known about citizen's attitudes towards interest groups, especially after legislation making lobbying transparent is passed. Using data from a pre-registered survey experiment conducted with a panel of 569 participants from the Republic of Ireland, this study shows that when exposed to information about lobbying conducted by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and business organisations, citizens do not improve their evaluations of interest groups. Surprisingly, against the general expectations found in the transparency literature, information about lobbying does not trigger positive changes in attitudes. A post hoc analysis of the participants' reactions to the transparency treatment reveals that citizens may have little interest or understanding of political activities such as lobbying. The study, however, also reveals that lobbying transparency does not backfire producing unexpected negative effects. This adds a new perspective to the recent debate on how public opinion responds to interest group behaviour.

Governments claim to establish lobbying registers with the intent of giving citizens and the media the opportunity to see who is lobbying whom and for what purpose. This external scrutiny is expected to help prevent undue influence and corruption. Scholars, however, have noted that transparency might also serve internal scrutinizers by providing information to the lobbyists themselves. This study employed a survey of more than 300 interest groups in Ireland to test this alternative to the 'armchair scrutiniser' assumption, whereby transparency serves the purpose only of public scrutiny. The analysis found that a small but well-defined group of organizations routinely accesses the website of the Irish lobbying register and 'consumes' the information during the advocacy process. Interest-group characteristics, such as group type and material resources, help explain these trends. This study is relevant for scholars interested in the effects of transparency and how the availability of information is linked to lobbying strategies.

AbstractScholars have recently shown renewed interest in the study of party‐interest group ties. According to previous studies, traditional ties between parties and organized interest are a matter of the past. Globalization, deindustrialization, and neoliberalism have posed serious challenges to their survival. Recent contributions suggest that, while these ties are indeed weaker than before, they have not disappeared. How do parties and groups protect their ties? This paper attempts to provide a partial, though often neglected, answer: their relationship survives when both actors work together to protect it. While previous literature identified regulatory policies, such as ethics and transparency regulations, as detrimental to party‐group ties, their introduction is erroneously treated as independent from these ties. Through a comparative case study of the introduction of lobbying laws in Austria, Australia, and Ireland, this paper suggests that parties and groups shape the content of lobbying regulations in such a way to protect their relationship.

Lobbying regulations belong to the political realm of ethics, integrity and transparency. They aim at regulating the activity of private actors who are seeking to influence the state. Existent research revealed that initiatives of transparency achieved through these laws help the government to install a level playing field for the participation of interest groups in the policy making process and to prevent cases of corruption. Besides, since these laws shed light over the policy making process, they allow citizens to hold policy makers accountable for their decisions. However, some lobbying laws guarantee higher levels of transparency and accountability than others. The level of transparency and accountability of lobbying regulations is defined as robustness. Previous research on this topic has revealed that provisions in lobbying laws can vary in robustness, that is to say they can be more or less robust. Building upon these studies, my project addresses two main research questions: First, what are the reasons for political systems to introduce lobbying regulations? -And secondly ?within political systems that have passed lobbying laws, why are some regulations more robust than others? My study offers two empirical Investigations to answer these questions. First, I explore the adoption of lobbying Laws in EU and OECD countries testing a set of explanations based on theories of political agenda setting, policy diffusion and systems of interest representation. Secondly, I explore the effects of corporatism, political corruption scandals and Partisanship on the robustness of lobbying regulations in the EU, Austria, Ireland and the UK. The empirical analyses are conducted using a mixed-method approach: as far as the adoption of lobbying laws is concerned, I use a quantitative event history analysis of 34 cases in the period between 1995 and 2014; the Determinants of the robustness of lobbying laws, in turn, are investigated in four case studies. This study represents the first comparative investigation of the emergence and the robustness of lobbying laws in contemporary democracies. The quantitative analysis of the adoption of lobbying laws (Chapter 3) suggests that IOs and states with regulations already in place encourage the diffusion of lobbying rules in OECD and EU member states. Neither levels of corporatism nor the media?s attention to scandals appear to be significant predictors of the adoption of lobbying laws. However, scandals influence the legislative activity around lobbying regulations. The results of the analysis suggest that media attention towards episodes of corruption influences the presentation of legislative proposals to regulate lobbying. These proposals, however, fail to become laws. I argue that this represents an expression of ?symbolic? politics. The results of the case studies (Chapter 6) of the EU and Austria suggest that systems of interest representation influenced of the levels robustness of the lobbying laws. The results of the investigation conducted in the UK and Ireland suggest that party politics and the saliency of lobbying scandals help to explain different levels of robustness. The results of this investigation can help scholars to better understand the reasons for which states develop transparency legislations and give a deeper insight into the dynamics related to accountability and transparency in the real world of politics. ; TARA (Trinity?s Access to Research Archive) has a robust takedown policy. Please contact us if you have any concerns: rssadmin@tcd.ie

Abstract
The UK has a fragmented, partial and weak system of lobbying regulation. The system creates a self-reinforcing cycle of 'exposure' and worsening public attitudes. In order to make the case for reform and indicate possible paths, this article reviews the system's faults and weaknesses and then analyses how the lack of political will for reform in Westminster has contributed to a transparency and integrity regime which falls below international standards. Finally, it examines how this cycle can be broken. While the UK lobbying law needs reform, we must look beyond the letter of regulation, taking into account the levels of use and political support, as well as the transparency and ethics ecosystem in which lobbying sits. Only by improvements to all of these areas can there be the possibility of stronger, more positive feedback loops, which can shift behaviour and, ultimately, attitudes.

AbstractScholarly evidence of transparency's beneficial effects on trust and perceptions of corruption remains debated and confined to the study of public administration. We contribute to this debate by extending the study of its effects to transparency legislation concerning members of parliament (MPs), political parties, and business interest groups. In an online experiment conducted in Ireland with 1373 citizens, we find that transparency in political donations improves trust in political parties, while asset declaration for conflict of interest prevention reduces perceptions of corruption toward MPs. However, transparency in lobbying is found to have no impact on attitudes toward business interest groups. This supports the common expectation that transparency improves political trust and reduces perceptions of corruption, but also confirms its complex effects. The study improves our understanding of transparency beyond open government providing an evaluation of different regulatory policies aimed at making the activities of parties, MPs, and lobby groups transparent.

AbstractIn this study we test whether interest organizations that are confrontational towards EU institutions are less successful than their more cooperative counterparts in obtaining funding from the European Commission (EC). The transfer of public funds to interest organizations is a key dynamic in state-civil society relationships. Research shows that organizations, especially public groups, often heavily rely on public funds to the point that, without funds, many would cease to exist. 'Don't bite the hand that feeds you' is thus a popular expression among leaders of organizations who apply for funds. Scholars document a widespread perception among group leaders that a confrontational attitude towards the state can lead to curtail of public funds. This perception is based on the assumption that state institutions use public funding to discipline confrontational interest organizations. We test this assumption using quantitative and qualitative data collected from a survey of 270 interest organizations who applied for EC funding between 2015 and 2018. Our findings suggest that, while almost half of our survey respondents feel that critical attitudes towards the EU would have negative consequences for their funding applications, empirically, confrontational and cooperative organizations have the same chances of obtaining EC grants. This finding is robust across different interest organization categories, including when non-applicants and mortality anxiety are considered in the analysis. The results add a new layer to resource dependency theory pointing at the incongruence between an organization's perception of its relationship with public institutions and the observation of that relationship.

There are more than 2,000 interest groups in Ireland that play a key role in policy development. This paper explores which of these groups have access to Irish policymaking across various political arenas. It does so by examining original data from 2018, gained through large-N survey research on over 300 active interest groups, including business groups, firms, professional organisations, NGOs, citizen groups and consultancies. The analysis focusses on four key venues of policymaking which lobbyists seek to influence: the media, government departments, the Dáil and state agencies. We find that lobbying access in Ireland is similar to other west European countries, but also different. Organisations with higher organisational capacity and that hire revolving door lobbyists declare more frequent access to almost all arenas. This is similar to existing accounts of bias in lobbying access reported in other countries. However, in contrast to scholarship focussing on other European political systems, access is not biased in favour of economic groups. The analysis fills an important empirical gap in the quantitative study of lobbying and adds an otherwise understudied perspective of non-state actor engagement in Irish politics.

AbstractTransparency in public institutions is relevant only in so far as the disclosed information is useful for the stakeholders who access it. Hence, we ask: what do users do with the information they obtain through transparency laws? Despite the growing interest in transparency research, the ways transparency portals are used to gather information remain strikingly understudied. We study the use of proactively and reactively disclosed information under four different transparency laws. Data are collected in the Republic of Ireland through a survey of what is generally considered to be the main category of users, benefiters, and guardians of transparency, namely journalists. This is one of the first surveys of the media's use of resources intended to ensure greater transparency in politics and offers a standard approach to the study of open government as a means to improve democratic governance.