The lobby regulation element of the European Transparency Initiative: between liberal and deliberative models of democracy.

Abstract

The EU's dependence upon exchanges with organised civil society as a proxy for popular participation makes its procedures for participatory governance critical for input legitimacy. The most recent of these is the European Transparency Initiative (ETI). The article examines the development of the lobby regulation element of the ETI, the detail of its operation and the concepts upon which it is founded, in order to consider its potential to contribute to wider goals of participatory legitimacy. The main energies devoted to creating the initiative were spent in the struggle to get it established, with relatively less attention given to the implications of operational issues involved in registration. Although transparency is the main focus, a legacy of predecessor initiatives on interest group representativeness, primarily spatial in concern, remain embedded in the scheme, which place limitations on advocacy-based groups. An alternative regulatory device to representativeness is that of accountability, which can be accommodated within the EU's existing framework of liberal democracy with elements of deliberative overtones, and of which traces can be found in the Code of Conduct associated with the registration scheme.