Availability: Lobbying data

To what extent is lobby register information available as open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

A lobbying register should include details on lobbyists, lobbying clients, and public officials, and track the contacts and transactions that occur between lobbyists and public officials, including when, with regard to what matters, how much money is expended, and for what goals. A register should include both regular updates and updates that are responsive to lobbying activities. The best lobbying registers are rigorously verified, either by an agency with a mandate to investigate reports and sanction violations, through cross-verification of a public official's and lobbyist's records, or both.

Although lobbying scandals occur worldwide, relatively few countries currently have frameworks that govern lobbying activities. The frameworks—and consequently datasets—that do exist appear across levels of government; in some cases multiple frameworks exist at the same level of government.

Research Guidance

Starting points

• Sources:
  • Transparency International's Integrity Watch includes political integrity information for ten countries: Chile as well as nine in Europe (France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Slovenia, Span, United Kingdom); depending on the country, this may include political finance data, interest and asset information, and lobbying data; from the main site, select "National versions" to see specifics for each country. Datasets are available here.
  • The Sunlight Foundation assessed the different kinds of databases associated with lobbying registers in 2016; the most right-hand column includes links. (Note: all of the links to the spreadsheet itself are currently inaccessible, but the linked article has an accessible version embedded about halfway through.)
• Search:
  • The lobbying register's site for details about data downloads, possible data formats, or APIs.
• Consult:
  • Investigative journalists who report on lobbying or money in politics more broadly, particularly any who appear to be using aggregate lobbying data.
  • Officials of civil society organizations that advocate for transparency and accountability regarding money in politics.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• What information about lobbying activities does the data include? For example, does it include information about the identity of participants, the date and time of activities, lobbyists' goals for activities, topics, and cost?
• Is the data not just regularly updated, but updated in a timely manner? For example, is it updated in response to lobbying activities, quarterly, annually, or on some other schedule?
• Is there evidence of missing data, assessed first against the related governance framework, if that exists, or in the context of the datasets in front of you?
• Is there evidence that the availability of this data was affected by COVID-19?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries, data about lobbying activities may be generated and published at the sub-national level, carried out by individual states, regions or cities.

Focus on national government first, and then assess whether:

• National datasets also include data from sub-national or local government units;
• Equivalent data exists for a selection of sub-national or local government units, but is not nationally aggregated;

To assess countries where data about lobbying activities is organized sub-nationally, researchers should select the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Data fields and quality (I):

• The data contains unique identifiers for each lobbyist and public official. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If lobbying data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where lobbyist and official identifiers are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains clear identifying information for each lobbying client. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If lobbying data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where identifying details about lobbying clients are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data fields and quality (II):

• The data contains participant details for each interaction between a lobbyist and a public official. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If lobbying data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where details about participants in lobbying interactions are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains information about lobbyists' goals for lobbying activities. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If lobbying data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where details about goals of lobbying interactions are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains dates and time details for each interaction between a lobbyist and a public official. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If lobbying data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where details about the dates and times of lobbying interactions are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains information about the topic of each interaction between a lobbyist and a public official. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If lobbying data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where details about topics of lobbying interactions are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains information about the money spent on each interaction between a lobbyist and a public official. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If lobbying data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where details about expenditures on lobbying interactions are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

• The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.

    Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?

  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Indicator Justification

In recent years lobbying has become an area of increasing regulation, with a priority placed on understanding who specifically lobbies. Thus, regulations typically require some form of lobbying register. Depending on how registers are construed, they may include not only identities of lobbyists but also transaction data regarding meetings, briefs, and gifts. Such registers ground a great deal of new empirical research (see, e.g., Bombardini and Trebbi 2020; de Figueiredo and Richter 2014) on lobbying. At the same time, they have gaps: different definitions of what requires reporting, sometimes within the same level of government (e.g., Mexico); more or less stringent sanction and cross-verification practices; differing capabilities for surfacing grassroots lobbying.

To understand both gaps and best practices across the world, this indicator investigates the data on lobbying activities that countries make available. This indicator pairs with a related governance indicator to compare frameworks and actual practice.