ABOUT THE EU TRANSPARENCY REGISTER

Does the Transparency Register (TR) component of EU lobby regulation place it in the vanguard of a ‘new wave’ of strong lobby regulation? If the criterion is the extent to which it places information in the public domain, the answer must be a qualified ‘yes.’ There are now more than 5500 individual entries, of which one-third did not select ‘European’ among the territorial level of interests they represent. It is estimated that around three-quarters of business-related organisations active in engaging EU political institutions are in the Register and around 60 per cent of NGOs with a European interest are in the Register. Not quite ‘de-facto mandatory’, but substantial when compared with the rather small number of entries in some of the national registers to have emerged in Europe in recent years. The quality of the data in the TR has progressively improved. Although some data quality problems remain, with a steady supply of quirky (but nonetheless transient) entries, the reliance upon those in the Register to monitor it has driven up standards of data entry among the main lobbying players. Nonetheless, there are faults of design and nomenclature, resulting in 15 per cent of entries in the NGO category being somewhat mis-placed, influencing the extent of public disclosure from this constituency. All of these issues will doubtless be considered in the upcoming review of the scheme, including the key question as to its voluntary nature. For research use, the identification of a ‘European interest’ represented and use of a Brussels address makes the data less prone to quirky outliers. Nonetheless, there are limits in aggregating data on some indicators (particularly head counts of those engaged in EU lobbying activities) because of the extent of outliers. However, some clear pictures emerge from the data, including a key finding that differences in reported resources are less than might be expected between business-related organisations and NGOs. Moreover, we can now know much more about EU lobbying from the available data, including about a key feature, which differentiates it from other political systems, the extent of public funding of civil society organisations and their relative dependence upon it. This helps give rise to other research questions, such as the extent to which the reliance by recipients upon EU funding creates dependencies. The available data informs analysis that can contribute to reviewing measures in place at EU level, and at a time when most EU member states have established regulatory instruments or currently have them under active consideration.