After some failed attempts to regulate the lobbying, the Israeli Parliament—the Knesset—passed the Lobbyist Law on April 2nd 2008. Although lobbying is a common and legitimate part of the democratic process, it raises issues of trust, equality of access, and transparency. What motivated the MKs to regulate lobbying—public interest, private interest, or symbolic politics? The MKs claimed that the law was needed for improving transparency whereas MK Yechimovich declared that it balances the strength of the rich, represented by lobbyists and the wide public. Assessing the achieved transparency in the comparative framework of other lobbying regulatory regimes, we see that the law confers tangible benefits on powerful interest groups, while providing only symbolic gestures to the public. Lack of information available for MKs creates a need for lobbyists for political intelligence and MKs need to identify the interests in play to guarantee for themselves the necessary legislative subsidy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Regulation has been claimed to be acquired by the industry, yet while the economic regulation was often established with the approval and encouragement of the regulated industry, social regulation has usually been thrust upon industry following demands by public interest groups. Why would the social regulation still fail to produce behaviour, or results in accordance with the public interest, if the public interest groups initiated it? The failure to define clearly the concept of 'public interest' and the absence of adequately clear regulatory objectives would not provide all the convincing answers. The wish of the politicians to respond to a mischief before public concern dies down, seems to point towards the symbolic politics claims.Although lobbying is integral to democratic politics, it challenges the policy making process as the risks and opportunities associated with policy change are large. Lobbying regulations, belonging to the social regulations fold, have been observed as symbolic in Israel and are diluted by tricky loopholes. Recent research has used data from Centre of Public Integrity (CPI) in order to theoretically classify different regulatory environments. The CPI measures only what the law says, but it does not measure the outcome-the application of the law. This paper points out that the possible interaction of symbolic politics with social regulation may lead to the reoccurring legislative void, resulting in the dilution effect of the lobbying regulations, and it highlights the need to review the theoretical classification, and thereby, also the actual strength of the different regulatory environments.

Lobbying in Israel was unregulated for 60 years. Scholars have decried the fact that high value is attached to the written decree, but implementation does not necessarily follow: quite a few laws have remained at symbolic level in Israel. There were two unsuccessful bills submitted to legislate lobbying regulation: first by Knesset Member (MK) Merom in 1993 and the second one by MK Naot in 2001. The bill submitted by MKs Yechimovich and Sa'ar in 2007 resulted in passing the Israeli lobbying regulations in 2008, but the Lobbyist Law displayed unexpected characteristics, and there was a 500% growth in lobbyist numbers. In 2012, a scandal shook the Israeli lobbying world as a crew from the Israeli Channel 2's investigative show Uvda (‘Fact’) infiltrated the training program of the Gilad Government Relations & Lobbying firm. Following the Channel 2 exposé, the Speaker of the Knesset MK Rivlin instructed Knesset employees to immediately forbid the entrance of all lobbyists to areas heavily used by MKs. These steps, taken almost 4 years after that the Knesset had passed a weak Lobbyist Law, scoring 28 points according to the Center of Public Integrity score, did not create more transparency but only set certain restrictions on the lobbyists' movements in the Knesset building. In 2013, MK Koll submitted a bill to further regulate the lobbying followed by another bill by MKs Yechimovich and Tsur in 2014. However, these bills were thrashed as the Knesset was dispersed in December 2014. This paper would analyze the bills from 1993, 2001, 2007, 2013, and 2014 by measuring their strength according to the Center of Public Integrity Index in order to explore the path that resulted in passing the Lobbyist Law in 2008 and in the following developments. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.