Have they Already Emerged? Mapping the Population of Interest Groups in Post-communist Poland

In recent years interest groups have attracted much of scholarly attention (Baumgartner et al. 1998; Beyers et al. 2008; Wonka et al. 2010 ). However, it has not necessarily concerned new democracies (focus being mostly on West European democracies). The reason for that is often a lack of available data on population ecology in those countries. Our article attempts to address both of those issues. By implementing a bottom-up approach in mapping the population of Polish interest groups, the study will allow us to observe in particular how the process of Europeanization informs structural and organizational changes within the organizations and young democratic civil society, and the influence of the multi-level context on strategic choices of interest groups in a large post-communist country in the aftermath of transformation to a capitalist state. In our approach, we firstly inform readers on building up database from existing scattered sources (INTEREURO, CONNEX, EUROLOB II), voluntary registries and the National Court Register. And, then, we characterize the Polish groups’ population. The paper will be oriented towards the interest groups studies audience, and will primarily present the findings of above described endeavor, analyzing the population of the Polish interest groups.