What Does Ethics Have to Do with Public Affairs? More Than Transparency Can Answer
Most Public Affairs professionals I know are ethical people. They care about doing their job well, meticulously comply with laws and regulations, and genuinely wish to contribute to better policymaking. And yet, the profession as a whole continues to struggle with a legitimacy problem that no amount of compliance seems to fix. The Public Affairs profession has made enormous strides on transparency. Lobbying registers, meeting disclosures, codes of conduct: the toolkit has grown considerably over the past two decades. However, the OECD’s 2026 anti-corruption and integrity outlook found that the quality of lobbying regulations remains among the lowest in OECD Member and partner countries’ integrity systems. If anything, the question of whether Public Affairs professionals are truly acting in the public interest feels more contested than ever. Something is missing.
Transparency and Accountability Are not the Same Thing
We tend to use these words interchangeably, but they describe fundamentally different things. Transparency is about visibility: making information available. Accountability is about answerability: being genuinely open to challenge, and by extension, to consequence. You can have a great deal of the first with very little of the second. A company can disclose every meeting it holds with a regulator, every euro spent on public affairs activity, every position paper submitted to a consultation, and still never face a meaningful question about whether its engagement is serving a narrow private interest or a broader public one. The result is that disclosure only seems to satisfy the ‘form’ of accountability without necessarily delivering its substance.
In our profession, we rarely confront ourselves with a key question: To whom are we actually answerable? In theory, the answer is straightforward: to the law, to our employer/client, to our industry association's code of conduct, and so on. But in practice, the publics most affected by lobbying and corporate influence, communities, consumers, ordinary citizens, have no formal mechanism to hold actors to account, and very limited ability to even identify who is shaping the decisions that affect them.
This isn't a criticism of individuals. It's a structural observation. The architecture of Public Affairs accountability is built around principals that are relatively easy to satisfy (regulators, shareholders, senior management) and largely silent on the harder question of what genuine answerability to democratic publics would actually look like. This structural gap is not something Public Affairs professionals can close on their own. As Prof. Bert Fraussen points out, genuine accountability requires the other side of the table to play its part too. Policymakers have a responsibility to ensure that all relevant stakeholders have a meaningful opportunity to be heard in a policy process, and to weigh those perspectives against each other in pursuit of policies that are both effective and legitimate. The two sides are interdependent: the integrity of the Public Affairs professional and the openness of the policymaker are conditions for each other, not substitutes.
Why This Matters: the Democratic Claim at the Heart of Public Affairs
There is an assumption so deeply embedded in Public Affairs practice that it rarely gets examined: that companies have a right to participate in the democratic process. To bring their expertise to policy debates, to represent the interests of their employees and shareholders, to engage with legislators and regulators as legitimate interlocutors. This assumption is, I think, broadly defensible. But it comes with a condition that the profession has been slow to reckon with.
If we ground our right to participate in democratic terms, and Public Affairs professionals do whenever they argue that lobbying is a form of legitimate civic engagement, then we are implicitly accepting that democratic standards apply to how we participate. We can't invoke democracy to justify our seat at the table and then sidestep the question of whether our conduct at that table is democratically accountable. That's not a technicality. It's a contradiction at the heart of the profession's self-understanding.
This is what makes the accountability gap more than a reputational problem. Most regulation of public affairs activities such as disclosure registers and codes of conduct, was built to manage visibility. It was not built to answer the harder question that the democratic legitimacy claim makes unavoidable: to whom, beyond your employer and your regulator, are we genuinely answerable for the influence of our exercise, and how do we use that influence?
Regulation remains vital, but it should make a quality jump. Disclosures and registers should be complemented by truly transparent lawmaking processes, mandatory consultation mechanisms that give affected publics a genuine right to be heard, and extended reporting requirements that cover not just lobbying but corporate philanthropy (another powerful, and largely unregulated, channel of private influence over public affairs). But the most promising contribution is likely to come from a renewed professional culture willing to hold itself to a higher standard than the law demands, and individual practitioners willing to ask, each time they act, whether their conduct would withstand not just legal scrutiny, but democratic scrutiny.