Abstract
Lobbying is one of the main structural elements of democratic governance and sustainable development and is essential to achieving competitive and effi cient administrative and decisional processes in local governance. Successfully implementing lobbying regulations and techniques is of extreme importance for any public system, where social participation in the decision-making process can strongly contribute to social, political and economic / fi nancial effi - ciency. Over the last 15 years, several legislative initiatives have tried to design a coherent framework for lobby, but they are still unapplied either due to insuffi cient public understanding of the concept, or due to more or less justifi ed uncertainties and fears. The necessity of regulating lobbying in Romania is placed in a context where an important number of anticorruption international and domestic recommendations and state reliability statistics, added to a certain lack of effectiveness in time and public money management, show that the public administration system needs to be reformed. And lobbying is, as the following article shows, a must for any public reform of public administration in Romania. The case of multilingual entrance signs / labels in Cluj-Napoca is an unquestionable and unbeatable example that the simple existence of legal frameworks of lobbying could turn into real time, energy and money savers.
Highlights
Lobbying is a key feature for any public administration and democratic system based on social participation, legitimacy of decision and interest representation, as it allows the decision-making structure to have a very accurate control over priorities, interests and orientation of representative groups
As recent reports released by Transparency International EU show, the average amount of money spent on lobbying activities in the European Union raises up to 1.5 billion euros, while the top 20 companies alone spend over 60 million Euros per year (Transparency International EU, 2015)
The present article is an attempt to prove the imperative need for a strong lobbying legal framework in Romania, where we face a legislative void in what lobbying is concerned and where every attempt to establish any legal framework for the lobbying practice are so far sentenced to oblivion
Summary
Lobbying is a key feature for any public administration and democratic system based on social participation, legitimacy of decision and interest representation, as it allows the decision-making structure to have a very accurate control over priorities, interests and orientation of representative groups. The European Union, one of the most democratic political forms of organization, has always been subjected to intense lobbying activities and its considerable enlargement has obviously led to an impressive increase concerning the number of lobbyists and lobbying activities. While the total number of lobbyists in the US may seem relatively limited, the total amount of money spent on lobbying activities is impressive, as Figure 1 on the evolution of total spending on lobbying in the United States of America between 1998 and 2016 shows:. While most European countries have successfully introduced lobbying in their legal practices, Romania is still facing the problem of not having any lobbying regulation This forces informal lobbying organizations to self-regulate, as the study shows, and leads to considerable waste of time, money, energy at administrative and social levels in what interest representation is concerned
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