Watching the wheels: who is monitoring lobbying at Westminster?

Worthy, Ben and Langehennig, Stefani and Morgan, Cat (2025) Watching the wheels: who is monitoring lobbying at Westminster? Interest Groups & Advocacy , ISSN 2047-7414. (In Press)

Abstract

This article seeks to examine how public officials and politicians, in particular MPs, react to new monitoring possibilities and any change in public attitudes towards those who are subject to monitoring. There is a growing trend towards new more expansive data-driven methods, rooted in the belief that openness drives accountability and behaviour change (Bitonti & Mariotti 2021: Coen et al. 2023). But do such approaches work? Can they, by informing, create a positive feedback loop to improve engagement and public attitudes around lobbying (Hamel 2024)? Looking specifically at the UK House of Commons, a small group of journalists and activists regularly monitor lobbying, drawing on a combination of data, FOIs, and exposes to expose what is happening. In 2023 a new database, Westminster Accounts, made it easier to scrutinise MPs’ donations. Taken together, these data create a fluid ‘politics of measurement’, shifting focus from individual members to group or the institutions as a whole. However, drawing on Westminster Accounts, a YouGov poll of MPs, and wider data use, we find the exact impact of monitoring is unclear and contradictory. Monitoring can have some ‘regulatory’ effects, curbing corruption and deterring poor behaviour in Parliament, through exposure and anticipated reaction. The Westminster Accounts platform has created a series of feedback effects, both positive and negative (Pierson 1993). It has kept the issue of lobbying, money and ‘second jobs’ high on the public agenda, while the issue salience has undoubtedly helped drive Labour’s commitments to reform. Yet the means of exposure, and narrative and pre-existing views about monitoring, means that it reinforces suspicions, creating a negative rather than positive loop. The weakness and gaps in the data create and reinforce a kind of democratic distortion around lobbying in the UK.

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