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This article familiarizes readers with the international research project ‘The Missing Link: Exploring Organized Interests in Post-Communist Policy-Making’ (OrgIntCEE). The project team has focused on how populations of organized interests in the region have evolved, how they interact with state institutions as well as the group-specific characteristics driving access to policy-makers. The project also explores how Europeanization has affected post-communist interest groups as well as other factors contributing to their “coming-of-age.” We provide a comprehensive overview of the population ecology and survey datasets, while shedding light on the challenges during the data collection process. After a short overview of the project context and structure, we present some country-specific aggregated data on organizational densities and their political activity. We also reflect on potential uses for the data, before wrapping up the article with a self-critical assessment of what could have been done differently as a roadmap for future research.

In many democratic systems, there is a tradition of interactions between political parties and interest organizations. However, for the CEE region, the factors driving such contacts remain partially undiscovered. Therefore, taking the organized interests’ perspective, we examine what factors influence the frequency of contacts with political parties, what types of parties are most attractive to groups and what kind of interest groups’ resources facilitates such contacts. The study relies on data from a large-scale survey of organized interests, bringing in a comparative perspective of the four selected countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. The results show that nearly half of interest groups in the region do not form any lobby routines with political parties, which is similar to the results of recent research in long-established democracies. However, regarding the other half, we see different patterns of contact depending on the country. The article finds strong support for the importance of the dominant party status for interest groups, but not necessarily for the number of seats that party holds in the parliament. Against the background of a fairly balanced picture of the Czech Republic and Slovenia, our results indicate extremely different attitudes of interest groups toward political parties in Hungary and Poland, countries willingly juxtaposed with each other in recent years. The results for Poland clearly show that the stronger the party's position and the greater the number of its seats in parliament, the greater the interest of the groups in contact. On the contrary, in Hungary groups rather declare contacts with opposition parties and those with a small and medium number of seats in parliament. Regarding the importance of resources, we found that among the three types of analyzed resources—financial horizon, different types of expertise and participation in umbrella organizations—only the last two are relevant.

This article aims to explain Europeanization processes among advocacy organizations from four post-communist states—Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic—which have been subject to strong Europeanization pressures before and after the European Union accession. The authors aim to identify how Central and Eastern European organized interests have adapted their organizational logics to a changing environment in the post-enlargement phase. Specifically, we address the following questions: How do various levels and dimensions of Europeanization of interest organizations differ across policy fields and countries and what determines this diversity? What are the strongest predictors of the specific forms of Europeanization? Against this background, we test how the specific characteristics of CEE advocacy organizations correlate with the different dimensions of Europeanization—its intensity, ways of occurring, variants, determinants, and outcomes.

In democratic countries, advocacy organizations and other organized interest groups play an important role in the process of creating public policies and as a consequence, they influence the final shape of the implemented development models. The inclusive decision-making process enables interest groups to fulfill a variety of functions. Interest groups are very important legitimation channel, they provide expert knowledge, and also they are major channel through which citizens can express their opinions to the decision-makers. Through their activities, advocacy organizations may influence specific policies as well as the overall direction of the evolution of the development model. This paper describes and explains the Europeanization process and its pressure on interest groups in Central and Easter Europe, also answering the question to what extent the Europeanization process enables interest groups to access the political process at the state level. Article relies on data from a large-scale survey of organised interests operating in four CEE countries (Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Czech Republic) in three policy sectors i.e. health care, higher education and energy policy. Based on the collected data, a linear regression analysis was performed.

This article presents an analysis of the formation of organized interest groups in the post-communist context and organizational populations over time. We test two theories that shed doubt on whether vital rates of interest groups are explained by individual incentives, namely, the political opportunity structure and population ecology theory. Based on an analysis of the energy policy and higher education policy organizations active at the national level in Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia, we find that while the period of democratic and economic transition indeed opened up the opportunity structure for organizational formations, it by no means presented a clean slate. Communist-era successor and splinter organizations survived the collapse of communism, and all three countries entered transition with relatively high density rates in both organizational populations. We also find partial support for the density dependence hypothesis. Surprisingly, the EU integration process, the intensity of legislative activity, and media attention do not seem to have meaningfully influenced founding rates in the two populations.