Corporate political activity is invisible in official registries

Evidence

The survey was sent out to 218 German companies in 2007 and addressed to people working as heads of public or government affairs departments in German companies. The sample companies had to be selected by self-research since no public register for public or government affairs activities exists for Germany. The selection criteria were that a company either had to have a separate public or government affairs unit or at least one person who was solely responsible for public and government affairs issues. The sample includes all DAX 100 companies, but also large-scale unlisted companies. The return rate of the survey was 47 per cent which makes this survey, to our knowledge, the most extensive one yet conducted in Germany focusing on the CPA of German companies. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 386

Categorization

• QUESTION: If no public register of lobbying activity exists, how do researchers or regulators ever measure the field systematically?