What is it about?
After some failed attempts to regulate the lobbying, the Israeli Parliament—the Knesset—passed the Lobbyist Law on April 2nd 2008. Although lobbying is a common and legitimate part of the democratic process, it raises issues of trust, equality of access, and transparency. What motivated the The Knesset Members (MKs) to regulate lobbying—public interest, private interest, or symbolic politics?
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Why is it important?
The Knesset Members (MKs) claimed that the law was needed for improving transparency whereas 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.
Perspectives
Lobbyist Law in Israel appears as an exercise in the symbolic politics. The law did create some transparency, but not as it was declared—transparency for the public to know— but the opaque transparency for the benefit of the MKs. As a ‘positive kick-back’ that Chari et al. (2010) mentioned, it also provided for the MKs some new means of defusing public concerns over how policy was being formulated.
Mr Albert Veksler
Dublin Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Opaque transparency: an analysis of the Israeli lobbying regulatory regime of 2008, Journal of Public Affairs, November 2011, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/pa.431.
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