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| Source: Daily Telegraph. |
Lobbying in its traditional secretive form - and the UK is rather strong in this tradition - leaves a poor audit trail and therefore students of the subject will be interested in this developing archive which is coming out of the Leveson enquiry. In contrast an example of better practice certainly in providing an audit trail of lobbying can be seen on the submissions for the EU Single Market Act.
Another source of data for research comes from the first Erasmus IP on Public Relations: Government Relations and Lobbying in a European Perspective which finished just before Easter and which I and colleagues and PR students from Greenwich participated in. The presentations and papers from this very interesting two week workshop attended by over 20 academics from seven universities and 60 Masters students across Europe are on the social network Yammer and can be made available to research students on request.
The potential for research in this area can be seen from an extract from a report I wrote just after returning from the first Erasmus:
"The strong foundations achieved with the first year of the Erasmus IP provide a good platform for further development of the programme. What is clear is that lobbying is a discipline of great power and influence but in practice terms would appear to be rather unreflective and with an uncertain praxis. The Erasmus IP therefore has the opportunity to help bring practitioners and academics together over the next few years and to help develop stronger research in a very important discipline for good governance and democracy."
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