Learning lessons? The registration of lobbyists at the Scottish parliament
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The Scottish Parliament was founded on principles of openness and accessibility and signalled the potential for a new style of politics after devolution. In the aftermath of allegations of political sleaze early in the life of the new institution, the Standards Committee of the Scottish Parliament conducted an inquiry into the registration of lobbyists. This process attracted much comment and criticism from public affairs practitioners and the Scottish media. Based on original empirical research, numerous interviews and first‐hand observation, the purpose of this paper is to offer a response to some of these criticisms. Design/methodology/approach The research reported here is based upon extended fieldwork and observation of the developing lobbying industry around the new Scottish Parliament, spanning the period from late 1998 until summer 2003. It involved some 73 interviews with various corporate and voluntary sector lobbyists, public servants and elected representatives. It also draws on participant observation at more than 70 official, public and private meetings for those involved in public affairs in Scotland. In addition, the paper monitored the popular and specialist media in Scotland for news and analyses of issues relating to lobbying at the new Parliament, undertook focus group research to test public opinion on the issue of registration, designed and administered an e‐mail survey of public servants in the USA and Canada charged with maintaining registers of lobbyists and conducted archival research at the Scottish Executive's library at Saughton House in Edinburgh. Findings The paper suggests the efforts by parliamentarians to regulate their relations with lobbyists need to be grounded in principles that apply to all outside interests seeking to influence the democratic process. Originality/value The paper challenges the assertions that lobbying is misunderstood by elected representatives and that the lobbying industry is entirely committed to increasing transparency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".