Abstract
Interest group and advocacy researchers have closely studied how different lobbying regulations emerge in varying political systems, but less attention has been given to the practices for enforcing those regulations or the interactional work of regulatory professionals. Through presenting transcripts of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission’s public meetings, the article demonstrates how enforcing lobbying regulations requires a stipulation practice. Though there are multiple practices required to effectively enforce lobbying regulations, investigative staff and commissioners approach this stipulation practice by scrutinising whether proposed actions, namely financial penalties, reflect the commission’s strategy across each and every case. Drawing on ethnomethodology and studies of legal professionals, the article argues that the enforcement of lobbying regulations involves ordinary practices for passing proposed enforcement actions.
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Notes
As of March 2019, each of the four current commissioners has Juris Doctor degrees.
The confidentiality rule was brought into effect by the Los Angeles City Charter 706, also referred to in the Los Angeles Administrative Code Section 24.29 General Provisions. Under the Commissions’ regulations, the City Attorney is not required to be in the room.
As one reviewer aptly asked: ‘What trust issues arise between commissioners and staff, and how are they resolved?’ The topic of “confidentiality”, and the refusal to provide certain information to commissioners, is evidently a topic in these meetings. Indeed, there is palpable annoyance and frustration expressed in some cases. The exchanges between commissioners and enforcement staff around the issue of confidentiality—or, the information that enforcement staff are not permitted to disclose to commissioners—could be said to be an issue of trust in the integrity of enforcement staff’s undisclosable negotiations with respondents.
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Molina, J. ‘Would you make your very best case’: enforcing lobbying regulations through stipulation practice. Int Groups Adv 8, 621–638 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00069-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00069-6