Involvement of Interest Groups from Central and Eastern Europe in EU Policy-Making: Comparative View

While interest groups research still represents a niche field in political science recently a lot of data have been gathered also on interest groups organised at the national level. Until now several publications on interest groups population and activities from EU level organisations and interest groups from western countries have been published. At the same time the studies on involvement of interest groups from countries from Central and Eastern Europe in EU policy making are still scarce. The argumentation often is that the studies on this population of interest groups would not bring anything new to the research on interest groups and that this interest groups system are not active enough in EU policy making. Based on the findings that interest groups from Central and Eastern Europe have less access to EU institutions in Brussels we may suppose that interest groups from Central and Eastern Europe engage in different activities when it comes to EU policy making. For an interest group to have an impact on EU policy making is not always necessary to be present in Brussels and directly influence EU decision makers. Interest groups may decide to take an indirect route of influence and try to lobby through membership in EU level organisations or take a national route and lobby national actors. In this paper we are interested in how are interest groups from selected post authoritarian countries from Central and Eastern Europe involved in EU policy making. Since previously the research findings have been often generalised on the example of one country to the whole region we will take a comparative approach. We will analyse interest groups from Slovenia and Lithuania that are both post socialist countries that joined European Union in 2004 and interest groups from Montenegro which is a candidate country. In this way we will be able to observe also the differences in interest groups involvement in EU policy making between member states and candidate state that is with the instrument of conditionality encouraged to strengthen their interest group system. We will use Comparative interest groups survey data that uses same research instrument and similar sampling process and provides us with highly comparative data. We will focus on the interest of interest groups from selected countries in EU policy making, their use of strategies, contacts with EU and national decision makers as well as their connections with EU level organisation. Quantitative data will appropriately be complemented with testimonials from civil society organisations that engage in EU policy lobbing in order to better capture their experience and practice. We would like to check two hypothesis in the paper: 1) Interest groups from Central and Eastern Europe are actively involved in EU policy making but they might choose different routes instead of the direct route to Brussels and 2) There are differences between interest groups activities in observed countries and research results from one country cannot be generalised over the whole region.