Do it as in Brussels? Ambivalent uses of the reference to EU lobbying in the lobbying regulation processes at national levels
Abstrakt
Over the past decade, EU member states as well as the EU's institutions have adopted transparency policies as a way of moralizing political practices and (re)gaining political legitimacy. These policies usually come with their own instruments, well known from their use in other areas, such as the regulation of product safety and other aspects of private actors' impact on society.
In the realm of public integrity, policies such as declarations of property, regulations of conflict of interests or lobbying regulations exemplify this turn to transparency as a stand-alone type of policy. The EU has played an important role in this process, with the European Transparency Initiative proposed in 2005 being described as a key step in the institutionalization of transparency as an integral component of the EU's mode of governance.
However, neither the co-occurrence of ETI and transparency policies at national levels nor the co-occurrence of political scandals and transparency policies provide a sufficient explanation of the simultaneous adoption of the same or similar transparency policies in different countries. First, the logics and dynamics of scandals have not changed dramatically over this period compared to what anthropologists and sociologists have taught us about scandals in the last centuries, and secondly, member states are often not obliged to adopt a particular policy and the EU institutions do not promote these actively.
Also, the link between light and virtue is by no means a novelty in theories of government (Jeremy Bentham) and in Western societies. The puzzle, then, is rather to explain how this deeply-rooted conception of virtue comes to be mobilized and translated into a specific type of policy.
The following question arises: how have policy instruments based on transparency become the type of policy ensuring public integrity?