Legitimacy through transparency, at what cost? The case of lobbying regulations as processes of negotiating private and public actors' public accountability
Abstract
The multi-level character of governance has no doubt given salience to the calls for more transparency of public decision- and policy-making processes. Complex governance systems have in addition been characterised by an increased involvement of non-state actors in decision-making.
However, while public actors have been used to accepting that democratic legitimacy required the acceptance of public accountability mechanisms, private actors have long been reticent to admit that their involvement or influence on decision-making may imply public accountability. The rise of transparency as a value in governance and thereby a source of legitimacy has affected the practices of accountability for both public and private actors.
The paper explores how they cope with the transparency imperative, particularly when faced with proposals of policies based on disclosure. It analyses the attempts at lobbying regulation in Poland (2003-2005) and the Czech Republic (2011-2013) as scenes of negotiation of public accountability obligations of private and public actors.
A close interpretive policy analysis of these processes shows that while welcoming the possibility of using transparency policies to strengthen their legitimacy, both try to minimize the implications for their own status in politics and policy-making. While private actors in the negotiations come to accept that a certain degree of transparency will be necessary, they try to avoid that disclosure be seen as linked to accountability.
Public actors, in turn, already function in a regime of public accountability and what they try to avoid is for new transparency provisions to upset this regime by creating supplementary conditions of democratic legitimacy.