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Published in:
An Introduction to Lobbying and Public Affairs in Europe Read chapter Read first chapter

2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. Bulgaria

Author : Detelina Dineva

Published in: Lobbying in Europe

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Abstract

Each country chapter of this volume provides an overview of the national lobbying industry, taking into consideration also institutional, historical and cultural variables, and placing the analysis of lobbying and public affairs into a wider picture. A short overview of the country’s political system is given, illustrating the institutional structure, the party system or the weight of particular political actors. In order to describe the features of the lobbying industry in the country, various pieces of information are considered, such as the regulatory framework (and relative ‘flaws’), the number of professionals working in the sector, the presence of specific educational pathways (master’s degrees or courses), the presence of professional associations and, if any, of deontological charters or self-disciplinary measures. Overall, an assessment on the degree of professionalisation and development of the industry is formulated, addressing also the perception of lobbyists by the public opinion and the influence of the EU supranational level on the national environment, imagining future scenarios and trends.

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Footnotes
1
Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Bulgarian into English are the author’s. For transliteration, the Streamlined System for the Romanization of Bulgarian is applied.
 
2
Tsakova (2005, 307) sees Bulgarian lobbyism as a unique combination of Western and ‘from-our-parts’, ‘Bulgarianized’ practices, of universal and local in the context of European integration and globalization. According to Prodanov (2012, 310), author of a profound study on the theory of the Bulgarian transition, ‘The belated and catching-up modernization of the country, its small size and high geopolitical dependence, due to which the main impulses of development are exogenous and not endogenous, create a peculiar interrelation between the sacral and the profane in the Bulgarian public space and political life, different from the ones in the developed Western states.’
 
3
During the 1990s, 95 per cent of the financing of the civil organizations in Bulgaria came from external sources: foreign foundations, international networks, embassies, and European and US programmes. To take as an example a single year, only one million USD out of the overall financial support for the Bulgarian NGOs (between 150 and 200 million USD) in 1997 came from the state budget and less than that—from the Bulgarian private sector (Prodanov 2003, 113, 119).
 
4
An interesting comparison between an NGO and a think tank is provided by Goran Buldioski, Director of the Open Society Institute’s Think Tank Fund. While they operate in the same political and social sphere, he says, think tanks and NGOs ‘discern significantly in their organizational cultures and often educational background’. And—what seems important in view of the current debate on think tanks in Bulgaria—‘Ever too often think tanks see themselves as part of the élites, closer to high politics and with exclusive (and often jealously guarded) access to decision makers’. (Buldioski, 26 May 2011).
 
5
According to sociologists and political scientists, this model is based on oligarchic politico-economic control over the state and a clientelistic-clannish system of policy-making (Diskusiya, 12 March 2013).
 
6
At a November 2010 conference on the regulation of lobbying activities in Bulgaria and the experience of the EU and the USA, the President of the National Assembly Tsetska Tsacheva stated that there were no professional, paid lobbyists in Bulgaria working on putting legislative initiatives through the parliament (National Assembly 2010, para. 3).
 
7
In his speech on ‘Lobbying: What Europe Can Learn from the US’ at a September, 2007 American Chamber of Commerce EU Plenary Meeting, Siim Kallas, then Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Administrative Affairs, Audit and Anti-Fraud, assessed the EC approach as very ‘soft’ in comparison with the US Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA). He considered the reinforced US rules as unnecessarily detailed for the European context, the administrative burden imposed by them—as too big, and emphasized his belief in the European system, ‘based on trust and self-regulation’ (Kallas 2007).
 
Literature
Dineva, D. 2010. Image-building and lobbying on American soil: The Bulgarian perspective. In Bulgarian-American dialogues, ed. A. Miltenova, and C. Vakareliyska, 87–99. Sofia: Prof. Marin Drinov Academic Publishing House.
———. 2015. The initial stages of Bulgaria’s transition to democracy and US policy. In Rethinking the past – Looking to the future, ed. A. Miltenova, C. Vakareliyska, and C. Holden, 53–70. Sofia: Boyan Penev Publishing Center.
Diskusiya ‘Mezhdu protestite i izborite – nakade varvi Balgariya?’. 2013, March 12. Bulgarian News Agency National Press Club
Kallas, S. 2007. Lobbying: What Europe can learn from the US. American Chamber of Commerce Plenary Meeting, 18 September, European Commission – SPEECH/07/544.
Lavergne, D. 2010. Ekspertite na prehoda: Balgarskite think-tanks i globalnite mrezhi za vliyanie. Sofia: Iztok-Zapad. Translated from the French edition: D. Anguelova-Lavergne (2007) La ‘main invisible’ de la Transition: think tanks et transition démocratique en Bulgarie après 1989 (Paris: EHESS), PhD thesis.
Mihailov, A. 1999. Kak da lobirame. Sofia: Fondatsiya za reforma v mestnoto samoupravlenie.
Mihova, M. 2014. The state of public affairs in Bulgaria. Journal of Public Affairs, 14(1): 76–83.
National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria – News. 2010, November 22. Regulation of lobbying activities in Bulgaria and the experience of the EU and the US discussed at a two-day conference entitled: ‘The Roles of Lobbyists’. http://​www.​parliament.​bg/​en/​news/​ID/​2143. Date Accessed 17 June 2014.
Nikolov, G. 2006, July 15–16. Skandali i lobirane belezhat nachaloto na darzhavnostta ni. Sega, 15.
Pirgova, M. 2002. Balgarskiyat parlamentarizam v usloviyata na globalen prehod. Sofia: Paradigma.
Prodanov, V. 2003. Grazhdanskoto obshtestvo i globalniyat kapitalizam. Sofia: Izdatelstvo Hristo Botev.
———. 2012. Teoriya na balgarskiya prehod. Sofia: Izdatelstvo Zahariy Stoyanov.
Transparency International – Bulgaria. 2014. Lobbying in Bulgaria: Interests, influence, politics. Sofia: Transparency International Bulgaria.
———. 2015. Transparency, integrity and equality of influence over policy-making in Bulgaria. Sofia: Transparency International Bulgaria.
Tsakova, I. 2005. Lobizam i demokratsiya. Sofia: Avangard Prima.
———. 2012. Lobizam i kapitalizam. University of National and World Economy Research Papers 2: 180–235.
Metadata
Title
Bulgaria
Author
Detelina Dineva
Copyright Year
2017
Book
Lobbying in Europe

Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55255-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-55256-3

Copyright Year: 2017

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55256-3_6