Lobby register

A Lobby Registry, also named Lobbyist Registry, Register for Lobby Transparency or Registry of Lobbyists is a public database, in which information about lobbying actors and key data about their actions can be accessed.

Its aim is to gain transparency about possible influences of interest groups on Parliamentarians and their staff. Several studies indicate that lobby transparency lead to a decrease of corruption. Registers exist for political committees of several countries. Their effectiveness is rated differently, strongly depending on their exact regulations. Many non-mandatory registers do not include powerful lobbyists.

Register opponents mainly argued in a survey that there would be no need for regulations, since it would be self-regulating and that they would fear a barrier of free exchange of views. Different from the US, West European countries had only weak lobby regulations for a long time. Authors of a study interpreted that the early West-European politic was not focusing the concept of lobby transparency to gain public confidence into political processes, but rather on promoting economic development by enabling undisturbed communication between politics and economy. This setting of priorities is currently changing due to scandals and public pressure.

Many Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) see means of controlling and sanction to handle missing or wrong entries as a central prerequisite for a working register. In many cases there are complains that this has not been put into practice.

Making an entry only mandatory if a certain threshold of money or time is spent on lobbying should prevent an inappropriately high bureaucratic burden for small actors (for example) in the US. Similar mechanisms are popular among supporters of a register.

Implementation as a database is favored over a list format since it allows not only searches but also enables data analysis and graphical representations.

Most registers contain at least the following data:

A survey among lobbyists conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revealed, that a majority of them would support a mandatory register and publication of the data above (excluding financial information). Some registers, for example the Canadian, require much more data.

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