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
Public administration is the implementation of government policy and also an academic discipline that studies this implementation and prepares civil servants for working in the public service. As a "field of inquiry with a diverse scope" whose fundamental goal is to "advance management and policies so that government can function". Some of the various definitions which have been offered for the term are: "the management of public programs"; the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day"; and "the study of government decision making, the analysis of the policies themselves, the various inputs that have produced them, and the inputs necessary to produce alternative policies."