Magister Legum - LLM / Political lobbying is a recent and widespread phenomenon that arises in countries where many big and economically important companies are located. It is a relatively new phenomenon and the term 'lobbying' has featured in political science literature only since the 1990s.¹ Lobbying groups are ubiquitous and are located in the centres of competence where political decision-making takes place.² One can distinguish two main aims of lobbying: lobbying for a government contract (Beschaffungslobbyismus) and lobbying with regard to laws (Gesetzeslobbyismus).³ The focus of this paper is on the latter. It is concerned to analyse how lobbyists influence the lawmaking process and what the consequences are for society. Lobbying is the influence on decision makers and decision-making processes through the provision of information.⁴ Politicians need information to contribute to ministerial or 1 parliamentary discussions and for their decisions in elections and votes. They often do not have the capacity to collect enough information. That is when the lobbying groups become important. They provide the politicians with information needed and thus ensure that their point of view ends up in the draft law and later in the law.⁵ There is also lobbying in the private sector. Representatives of the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, try to influence doctors by giving them free specimens and computer programmes, paying for education workshops and other benefits with the aim that the doctors prescribe the products of the pharmaceutical companies.⁶ To analyse this aspect of lobbying as well would exceed the scope of this paper and will not be attempted. An interesting aspect is that lobbying has become more integrated and international. Lobbyists do not work exclusively in their countries of origin. In the EU it is as important to lobby decision makers in the European institutions as to lobby them in the national institutions because a significant part of politics is decided now in Brussels.⁷ Furthermore, lobbyists from different countries meet to harmonise their lobbying strategies. In Brussels, for example, American and German lobbyists meet regarding restrictive export rules into the US and the EU. The American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM) is an American interest group that works in Brussels to ensure the effective representation of US businesses in Europe.⁸ Nevertheless, the national level remains important for lobbyists. The policy of the EU relies always on national policy and through the Council of Ministers - as the most powerful part of the EU - national interests are represented strongly in Brussels. Directives, moreover, have to be implemented on a national level. One can see that national lobbying is also an important tool to influence European policy.⁹ The scope of this paper, however, is to shed light on lobbying activities in the Federal Republic of Germany. Therefore, lobbying in the EU will play a lesser role.

Past research has confirmed the importance of structural and individual-level factors in predicting voter turnout and citizen trust in the government. In international research particularly, political corruption has been shown to negatively affect citizen trust, though the effect of corruption on voter turnout is mixed. To date, no research has examined the effect of corruption on voting and government trust in the United States over a relatively long period of time. In this dissertation, I aim to answer two primary research questions: how U.S. corruption affects voting and how it affects citizen trust in the government. Using many sources of data for state-level variables, and the American National Election Study (NES) for individual-level variables, I investigate these relationships using multilevel modeling (MLM) of forty-six states and approximately 22,000 individuals in my analysis of voting and forty-one states and about 7,000 individuals in my analysis of political trust. I find that corruption has a small, but significant, negative effect on voting. Surprisingly, I find no effect of corruption on a citizen’s political trust, even after assessing the impact of corruption on four other specifications of trust. I also investigate cross-level interaction effects for each analysis, and find no significant results. I conclude with a discussion of possible explanations for these findings, make policy recommendations with the knowledge gained from this research, and offer suggestions for future investigations.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Government and Public Administration

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1995. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 517-550).

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985. / Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 517-550).

published_or_final_version / SPACE / Master / Master of Arts

The primary goal of this thesis is to provide a comparative analysis of the institutional and organizational mechanisms designed to monitor and control political corruption at the national level. The paper will provide comparisons of these arraignments and control systems across three nations. The thesis will identify differences across countries in terms of organizational and institutional political corruption control mechanisms, and use the CPI index to suggest and identify those control mechanisms that appear to be present in nations with low CPI measurements. Finally, the thesis will conclude with the discussion concerning the future prospects for controlling political corruption in Turkey based on the comparative analysis described above.

This dissertation seeks to examine why democratic systems and electoral competition can sometimes fail to secure clean government in the interest of the electorate. The question of why voters support corrupt politicians, despite disapproving of corruption itself, is of critical importance if it is to be believed that corruption has a detrimental effect on development. The core argument of this dissertation is that party system features that improve accountability by shaping the efficacy of elections as tools to select and control politicians, play a vital and overlooked role in conditioning the scope for corruption. I conceive of governmental corruption as a classical principal-agent model, in which voters‘ relationships with their representatives are mediated by the extent to which party systems enable the electorate to select non-malfeasant politicians who seek to curb corruption and to hold accountable those who do not. This thesis purports that party systems which reduce agency problems confronting voters, by making available information regarding the quality of their incumbents and potential challengers and structurating effective, choices at the polls, decrease the latitude for governmental corruption. This thesis probes this argument through a controlled comparative analysis of corruption in 91 contemporary democracies and three nested-design case studies. The large-N analysis and the case studies of Panama, India, and Mexico offer broad support for these hypotheses.