Exploring Organized Interests in Post-Communist Energy Policy-Making

In recent years, political science has made a strong contribution to the comparative analysis of organized interests in political processes. However, the post-communist countries have largely been neglected up to now. To overcome this research gap, we wish to explore the democratic-participative opportunities and the impact of organized interests on the energy policies of two post-communist countries – Hungary and the Czech Republic. First, we provide a general stocktaking of interests groups and the existing conflict lines in energy policy in both countries. Second, we examine legislation regarding the regulation of lobbying activities and party funding, in order to gain insights on the lobbying regimes which have evolved since 1989. Against this background, we shed light on the role of organized interests in the mobilization and articulation of civil society and business interests in Czech and Hungarian energy policy. The main part of our analysis is dedicated to the study of the influence of energy and environmental lobbies on policy outputs in both new democracies. In doing so, we focus on interest group-specific (i.e. diffuse vs. concentrated interests), issue-specific (distributive vs. regulatory policies) as well as socio-economic factors (i.e. degree of economic coordination), which may mediate the influence of organized interests on post-communist policy-making processes. Based on the “preference realization method” we analyze to what extent organized interests have succeeded bringing important energy policy legislation (e.g. energy efficiency, renewable energies, energy security) in line wither their preferences. We simultaneously examine the influence of EU accession on the democratic-participative opportunities as well as the political weight of organized interests in the energy sectors of the Czech Republic and Hungary.