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Regulating lobbying is a rather recent concept in the majority of EU member states. Currently, only seven member states (France, Ireland, Lithuania, Austria, Poland, Slovenia and the UK) have legislation on lobbying activities, as well as a mandatory register of lobbyists. The most recent law has been adopted in France on 8 November 2016. Lobbying regulations are a form of transparency law that lets citizens know who is lobbying whom about what. This chapter offers a discussion of recent international dynamics in lobbying regulations. With a focus on the EU regulation, we present a comparative analysis of the robustness of lobbying laws in 16 jurisdictions found throughout the world, offering key insights into the recent trends of strengthening lobbying rules globally.
This paper analyses the strength of the new laws regulating lobbying in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK). This examination was conducted using the Centre for Public Integrity’s (CPI) “Hired Guns” quantitative method for assessing the stringency of lobbying legislation. These laws were introduced, after years of unfulfilled promises and scandals, in an effort to increase the public’s trust in their representative institutions. We find that the Irish Regulation of Lobbying Act 2015 offers a slightly higher level of transparency than the UK’s Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014. Additionally, using the CPI’s index allows our findings to be compared with those from other jurisdictions around the world with lobbying regulations in place.