Lobbying in the United Kingdom
Formal procedures enable individual members of the public to lobby their Member of Parliament but most lobbying activity centres on corporate, charity and trade association lobbying, where organisations seek to amend government policy through advocacy. Companies and individuals who operate in this sector commonly use the terms "public relations", "public affairs", "political consultancy" or "corporate affairs" to describe their activities (though this was also a reaction to the negative publicity surrounding the word "lobbyists" following the 1994 Cash-for-questions affair). Professional public affairs agencies, representing multiple clients, undertake a significant proportion of lobbying activity in addition to individual organisations conducting lobbying on an in-house basis.
Public administration
Comparative public administration or CPA is defined as the study of administrative systems in a comparative fashion or the study of public administration in other countries. There have been several issues which have hampered the development of comparative public administration, including: the major differences between Western countries and developing countries; the lack of curriculum on this sub-field in public administration programs; and the lack of success in developing theoretical models which can be scientifically tested. Even though CPA is a weakly formed field as a whole, this sub-field of public administration is an attempt at cross-cultural analysis, a "quest for patterns and regularities of administrative action and behavior." CPA is an integral part to the analysis of public administration techniques. The process of comparison allows for more widely applicable policies to be tested in a variety of situations.