¿Del secretismo a la transparencia?: análisis del registro de lobbies y las agendas diarias del Ayuntamiento de Madrid (2018-2023)

This article aims at finding out who the elected officials of the Madrid City Council have met with and what issues are most relevant for local policy-making during the period 2018-2023. The Transparency Ordinance of the City of Madrid (OTAM), approved in 2016, created the Lobbying Register as a transparency means that, together with the publication of the agendas of public officials, should allow the citizens of Madrid to know how decisions are made and what private interests are considered. However, previous studies indicate that the Transpar-ency Portal detects a very low number of meetings in which business interests predominate. The article examines an original database that includes data from the Lobbying Register, the Census of Municipal Entities, the Transparency Register of the Community of Madrid, and the agendas of public officials. This database manages to identify a greater number of actors (4439 compared to 981 registered) involved in municipal politics, and meetings (6863 compared to 2494).Based on this, our article identifies two design errors included in the OTAM that would be compromising the effectiveness of the Transparency Portal: on the one hand, that civic, social, and neighborhood entities registered in the Census of Municipal Enti-ties are not required to register in the Lobbying Register despite being able to meet with public officials. On the other hand, that the application of a behavioral definition of lobbying, and the lack of supervision, allows many companies and citizens, of which there is no record of having met with public officials, to register in the Lobbying Register. This allows us to conclude that, in practice, the Lobbying Register offers information on companies, citizens, and ‘supra-municipal’ business associations, while meetings with civic associations and trade unions, not being required to register, are not clearly identified in the Transparency Portal.