Lobbying Regulation in the Czech Republic: Negotiating Public and Private Actors' Roles in Governance
Abstract
During the last decade, states across Europe have tried to adopt targeted policies to regulate lobbying. Yet, among the first ones to pass such regulations have been post-communist countries.
This paper gives a comparative account of policy processes in two Central European countries, Poland and the Czech Republic in an attempt to answer the following question: What is at stake when policy-makers try to regulate lobbying? The paper takes an interpretive approach to public policy in order to trace this negotiation of meanings and roles, concentrating mostly on the scope and choice of regulation instruments as they appear in the Polish and Czech cases. It builds on semi-structured interviews with Czech and Polish policy-makers and lobbyists, non-public stakeholder debates, as well as parliamentary debates.