Lacy-Nichols Jennifer, Baradar Hedeeyeh, Crosbie Eric, Cullerton Katherine
Centre for Health Policy, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
School of Public Health, University of Nevada Reno, Reno, NV, USA.
Int J Health Policy Manag. 2024;13:8497. doi: 10.34172/ijhpm.8497. Epub 2024 Oct 8.
While anyone can lobby governments, most lobbying is driven by commercial interests. Due to limited government disclosures, it is often challenging to get a clear picture of who is lobbying whom or why. To help make lobbying more visible to the public, we set out to develop a framework of key criteria for best practice government lobbying disclosures.
We undertook a systematic scoping review of peer-reviewed and grey literature to identify frameworks for measuring or evaluating lobbying transparency. We screened the titles and abstracts of 1727 peer-reviewed and 184 grey literature articles, assessing 230 articles for eligibility. Following screening, we included 15 frameworks from six peer-reviewed and nine grey literature articles in our review. To create our framework of lobbying disclosures, we thematically coded the 15 included frameworks and used an iterative process to synthesise categories.
The 15 frameworks covered more than only lobbying disclosures, with the most common other theme about enforcement and compliance. Most frameworks were developed to evaluate lobbying transparency in particular jurisdictions, with the United States the most common. Of the 15 frameworks analysed, those developed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) focused mainly on improving lobbying regulations, while most peer-reviewed studies developed frameworks to measure, compare and evaluate lobbying regulations. We developed a Framework fOr Comprehensive and Accessible Lobbying (FOCAL). It comprised eight primary categories (scope, timeliness, openness, descriptors, revolving door, relationships, financials, and contact log) covering 50 total indicators.
Government transparency plays a crucial role in facilitating access to information about commercial political activities like lobbying. Our framework (FOCAL) offers a template for policy-makers to develop or strengthen regulations to improve lobbying transparency so commercial political influence strategies are more visible and subject to public scrutiny. This is an important step towards rebalancing influence toward the public interest.
虽然任何人都可以游说政府，但大多数游说活动是由商业利益驱动的。由于政府披露的信息有限，要清楚了解谁在游说谁以及为何游说往往具有挑战性。为了使游说活动对公众更加透明，我们着手制定一套最佳实践政府游说披露关键标准框架。
我们对同行评审文献和灰色文献进行了系统的范围界定审查，以确定衡量或评估游说透明度的框架。我们筛选了1727篇同行评审文献和184篇灰色文献的标题和摘要，评估了230篇文章是否符合要求。筛选后，我们在综述中纳入了来自六篇同行评审文献和九篇灰色文献的15个框架。为了创建我们的游说披露框架，我们对纳入的15个框架进行了主题编码，并采用迭代过程来综合分类。
这15个框架涵盖的内容不仅仅是游说披露，最常见的其他主题是执法和合规。大多数框架是为评估特定司法管辖区的游说透明度而制定的，其中美国最为常见。在分析的15个框架中，非政府组织（NGO）制定的框架主要侧重于改进游说法规，而大多数同行评审研究则制定了用于衡量、比较和评估游说法规的框架。我们制定了一个全面且易于理解的游说框架（FOCAL）。它包括八个主要类别（范围、及时性、开放性、描述符、旋转门、关系、财务和联系记录），共涵盖50个指标。
政府透明度在促进获取有关游说等商业政治活动的信息方面起着至关重要的作用。我们的框架（FOCAL）为政策制定者制定或加强法规以提高游说透明度提供了一个模板，从而使商业政治影响策略更加透明并受到公众监督。这是朝着重新平衡有利于公共利益的影响力迈出的重要一步。
