Shining a light on lobbying: understanding knowledge of lobbying rules and attitudes towards trust

Lobbying regulations provide transparency to the often-opaque process of lobbying. Apart from transparency, however, a secondary objective of lobbying regulations is to improve trust in the processes of lobbying and ‘politics’ more broadly, with transparency touted as facilitating this development. In this chapter, we explore this relationship between trust and lobbying regulations, first by outlining the trust-based objectives of these regulatory tools, and second by analysing the degree to which these trust-based objectives have been achieved from citizen, interest group, and policy-maker perspectives. We highlight that while lobbying regulations no doubt attempt to improve trust, the relative impact can generally be considered small and slow. This may be due to the relative youth of lobbying regulations, the majority of which have only come into existence in the last 20 years, as well as the requirement of actors to actively engage with lobbying transparency efforts in order to facilitate the creation of trust.

Another explanation, however, may be the changing relationship between trust in lobbying as a political process and the role that lobbyists have in the policy-making process, and the decision to enact lobbying regulations in the first instance. We challenge the traditional assumptions by develop a new conceptual framework to understand the fluctuating national and global trends that are leading to ‘least likely’ cases such as high-trust corporatist settings to adopt lobbying regulations. As such, this chapter contributes to the broader discussion surrounding not only how lobbying regulations develop trust in politics, but also seeks to understanding why lobbying regulations are established from a trust-based perspective. This conceptual framework offers a new perspective through which future research may view the relationship, develop it, and test it.