I am looking at lobbying regulation policy in Israel, focusing on the gap between the declared goals of the lobbying regulations introduced in 2008 to regulate the business/politics nexus and how those goals have found expression in the resulting law and its subsequent implementation. The case is interesting as this seems to be a problem that occurs a lot with lobbying regulations – seemingly great aims that fall a long way short. The context is really the broader trend towards regulating the interactions of businesses and politics that are occurring across the world today. Israel is one piece in that bigger puzzle. The problem is – just because you seek to regulate – does not always mean it works out well.
The worldwide trend can be observed – 12 out of 16 countries of the OECD (Poland, Hungary, Israel, France, Mexico, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Chile, United Kingdom, Ireland) which have adopted lobbying regulations did so in the last decade (Vargovcikova, 2015). In France, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic discussions are ongoing about possible revisions, whereas Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy are in the process of preparing their first regulations. More and more states seem to be regulating lobbying using transparency provisions based on registers and reporting as policy instruments, but the impact of the regulation is questionable and there’s almost no interest among the policy-makers to achieve more effective regulations.
More and more public and private actors want to be seen as supporting lobbying regulation, including lobbyists themselves, yet at the same time, these very same actors seem to be contributing to its ineffectiveness and lack of implementation.
So far I have published 3 journal articles from this research – and I am currently working on a 4th. I have presented my research at numerous conferences in the US, Europe, and Israel and in the UK House of Commons to provide evidence to a committee there investigating lobbying regulations.

 

Opaque transparency: an analysis of the Israeli lobbying regulatory regime of 2008

Journal of Public Affairs, November 11, 2011
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pa.431/abstract 

Abstract:

After some failed attempts to regulate the lobbying, the Israeli Parliament – the Knesset, passed the Lobbyist Law on April 2nd, 2008. While lobbying is a common and legitimate part of the democratic process, it raises issues of trust, equality of access, and transparency. What motivated the Knesset Members (MKs) to regulate lobbying – public interest, private interest, or symbolic politics? The MKs claimed that the law was needed for improving transparency while MK Yechimovich declared that it balances the strength of the rich, represented by lobbyists and the wide public. Assessing the achieved transparency in the comparative framework of other lobbying regulatory regimes, we see that the law confers tangible benefits on powerful interest groups while providing only symbolic gestures to the public. Lack of information available for the MKs creates a need for lobbyists for political intelligence and the MKs need to identify the interests in play to guarantee for themselves the necessary legislative subsidy.

 

Lobbying in the Sunshine – Hiding Behind Transparency?

Journal of Public Affairs, 2015
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pa.1564/abstract

Abstract:

Lobbying in Israel was unregulated for sixty years. Scholars, like Yishai (1998) have decried the fact that high value is attached to the written decree but the implementation does not necessarily follow: quite a few laws have remained at a symbolic level in Israel. There were two unsuccessful bills submitted to legislate lobbying regulation: first by Knesset Member (MK) Meron in 1993 and the second one by MK Naot in 2001. The bill submitted by MKs Yechimovich and Sa’ar in 2007 resulted in passing the Israeli lobbying regulations in 2008, but the Lobbyist Law displayed unexpected characteristics and there was a 500% growth in lobbyist numbers. In 2012 a scandal shook the Israeli lobbying world as a crew from the Israeli Channel 2’s investigative show Uvda (’Fact’), infiltrated the training program of the Gilad Government Relations & Lobbying firm. Following the Channel 2 exposé, the Speaker of the Knesset MK Rivlin instructed Knesset employees to immediately forbid the entrance of all lobbyists to areas heavily used by MKs. These steps, taken almost 4 years after that the Knesset had passed a weak Lobbyist Law, scoring 28 points according to the CPI score, did not create more transparency but only set certain restrictions on the lobbyists’ movements in the Knesset building. In 2013 MK Koll submitted a bill to further regulate the lobbying followed by another bill by MKs Yechimovich and Tsur in 2014. However, these bills were thrashed as the Knesset was dispersed in December 2014. This paper would analyze the bills from 1993, 2001, 2007, 2013, and 2014 by measuring their strength according to the CPI Index in order to explore the path that resulted in passing the Lobbyist Law in 2008 and in the following developments.

 

Neurotic Regulations – Goals and Results of the Israeli Lobbyist Law

http://apps.mpsanet.org/Directory/Search.aspx?session=7188

Abstract:

Many scholars claim that lobbying regulations offer increased accountability to the voters and transparency of the decision-making processes, as well as diminishing gaps in the system, which would allow for corrupt behavior. The declared goals of the Israeli Lobbyist Law (2008) were transparency, public interest, and order, yet neurotic incoherence was observed when the goals and the results of the legislation were compared. If regulators are aware that their goals are unattainable and want to pronounce an idealistic social policy to preserve underlying values even at the cost of a certain amount of deception, then the regulations would never achieve their declared goals. The law did not regulate lobbying the government, legitimized the lobbyists in the Knesset, and provided Knesset Members (MKs) with some new means of defusing public concerns over how the policy was being formulated. This paper will show that the interviewed MKs admitted using declarative bills and legislation in order to pronounce a social policy or to preserve certain underlying values. New evidence reveals a subtle, mutually beneficial relationship between MKs and lobbyists, which may have also influenced the legislative process of the lobbying regulations. Transparency was perceived as a method to cover up the omission of dealing with real issues of needed policy change. This gap between the declared goals and the resulting implementation of the law reveals the face of the symbolic policy and is a sign of institutional failure of modern society.