Measuring the link between democracy and transparent lobbying

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we discuss the link between democracy and transparent lobbying indices. We assume that a deeper understanding of attributes of the transparency of lobbying help to develop more complex tools of measurement of quality of democracy. We briefly introduce five common indices of quality of democracy and analyze its indicators in terms of transparency requirements. Second, we present a catalog of all pro-lobbying transparency measures with four categories involving lobbyists, targets of lobbying, sunshine rules, and monitoring and sanctioning rules. Third, we carry out a statistical analysis of the democracy indices and lobbying indices. Fourth, we identify sub-indicators in the introduced indices and assign a value to each individual indicator in the indices to determine whether measures of transparent lobbying have relevance with respect to these indicators. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the links found between indicators of the quality of democracy and transparent lobbying.

KEYWORDS:

• Transparency
• lobbying
• democracy index
• democratic theory
• Delphi method

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Democracy Barometer is omitted from the correlational analysis – its large number of variables and their aggregation raises important methodological questions that are beyond the scope of this text.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grantová Agentura České Republiky [16-08786S];University of Hradec Kralove [Specific Research 2018 – International Conferenc].

Notes on contributors

Vít Šimral

Vít Šimral currently serves as a Councilor of the City Prague, responsible for education, sports, science, and business development. Previously to entering politics, he was a member of several anti-corruption bodies in Europe, both in the NGO and in the public sector. He remains a part-time member of the Czech academia, carrying out research or teaching at the University of Hradec Králové and the Technical University of Liberec. His academic research focuses on issues of corruption, public procurement, political funding, and lobbying.

Šárka Laboutková

Šárka Laboutková works as an associate professor at the Economics Department of the Faculty of Economics at the Technical University of Liberec (TUL) and guarantees there the curriculum of the master’s program Economic Policy in the Global Environment. Her research activity is primarily focused on the theory of impact of non- economic factors on decision-making in public policy, especially lobbying. She is the author of many journal articles and a coauthor of the first Czech comprehensive publication on lobbying.