Opaque: an empirical evaluation of lobbying transparency in the UK



McKay, Amy Melissa and Wozniak, Antal ORCID: 0000-0003-4772-0278
(2020) Opaque: an empirical evaluation of lobbying transparency in the UK. INTEREST GROUPS & ADVOCACY, 9 (1). pp. 102-118.

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Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The government of the UK is reputed to be among the world’s most transparent governments. Yet in comparison with many other countries, its 5-year-old register of lobbyists provides little information about the lobbying activity directed at the British state. Further, its published lists of meetings with government ministers are vague, delayed, and scattered across numerous online locations. Our analysis of more than 72,000 reported ministerial meetings and nearly 1000 lobbying clients and consultants reveals major discrepancies between these two sources of information about lobbying in the UK. Over the same four quarters, we find that only about 29% of clients listed in the lobby register appear in the published record of ministerial meetings with outside groups, and less than 4% of groups disclosed in ministerial meetings records appear in the lobby register. This wide variation between the two sets of data, along with other evidence, contribute to our conclusion that the Government could have made, and still should make, the lobby register more robust.</jats:p>

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Lobbying, Government transparency, Lobbying regulation, Interest groups, British lobbying, UK Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 31 Jan 2020 14:31
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 00:05
DOI: 10.1057/s41309-019-00074-9
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3072829