October 2018, Year X, n. 10
Theodoros Koutroubas
What can lobbyists really do
Telos: How would you define lobbying?
Theodoros Koutroubas: The word lobbying comes probably from the main hall, the "lobby", of the Houses of Parliament in London, where persons from all the provinces of the UK were gathering to meet their local parliamentarians and to inform them of issues of importance from their constituencies, that would necessitate action and decisions from the Parliament and the central government.
In the context of participative democracies of today, citizens are not just a silent "subject" of some new kind of elected monarchs, who grant them the right to decide about the great lines of the nation’s governance only once every four or five years, at the official occasion related to the renewal or not of their regal mandates ...more
Editorial
If you really think about it, without lobbying, considering everything that goes along with “informing and persuading” the system of public decision-makers, representative democracy as we know it wouldn’t even exist. However, it still seems to be is the best form of State political organisation (or the least terrible, according to varying points of view) that humanity has managed to come up with.
I continue to disagree that lobbying is persuasion and insist, almost to
the point of being stubborn, that lobbying is representing a position ...more
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