Status of lobbying in a transition country

Lobbying as a communication process contributes to citizens’ participation in creation or changing of public policies, and represents an important part of developed democratic societies. In addition, lobbying as a business industry employs a large number of highly educated professionals worldwide. Both facts indicate the importance of lobbying in the modern business and political environment. Nevertheless, in transition countries, lobbying often has a negative reputation in public and is connected with unethical practice.

The aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive overview of lobbying in Croatia, by representing the current status of lobbying in the three following aspects: its reputation in media, citizens’ attitudes towards lobbying, and perceptions of lobbying among business people.

For that purpose research was conducted in three phases. (1) In order to explore the reputation of lobbying in the media, quantitative and qualitative content analysis of information published in daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and on Internet portals were conducted. In total 512 samples of content were analyzed. (2) To understand the attitudes of citizens towards lobbying, a Thurstone scale for measuring attitudes, through method of equal appearing intervals, was constructed and applied on a convenient sample of 104 respondents. (3) Finally, to understand how business society perceives lobbying, a survey among 50 business people employed by government institutions and 50 of those employed by private sector enterprises was done.

The results of the media content analysis point that lobbyists and lobbying are attractive to media. This is supported by the fact that the number of media content on lobbying is rather large and increasing through the time. It is interesting to note that contents in which lobbying represents the essence of a text are dominantly positive in their tone. Regarding the citizens’ attitudes towards lobbying, Thurstone scale show that attitudes of younger population in Croatia towards lobbying are neutral to moderately positive. Finally, perceptions of lobbying among business people are predominantly positive. Their perceptions differ in relation to their age, and not in relation to their source of employment (private or government sector).

To conclude, present status of lobbying in Croatia is satisfactory, especially taking into consideration that the Law is still in progress. It can be expected that lobbying will be further understood and used when Croatia formally enter the European Union, starting from 1^st July 2013.