The Population Ecology of Interest Organizations in Regulatory and Redistributive Sectors in Hungary, Poland and Slovenia

Several standard hypotheses explaining the population density of interest organizations have been tested on large-N databases of lobby groups on the European Union level. Authors have studied both formal, registered lobbyist at the European Parliament (e.g. Berkhout et al. 2015) and more informal lobbying at the different Directorate Generals of the European Commission (e.g. Broscheid and Coen 2005). On the EU level in the last decade there is a growing body of literature seeking to explain the differences in the numbers of interest organizations both by the constraints of the policy process (demand side) and by the properties of the population environment (supply side) (Messer et al 2011; Berkhout et al. 2015). Also, studies have compared the differences across policy domains, for example Broscheid and Coen (2005), who found that distributive policy domains have fewer lobbying groups than regulatory ones. While interest groups in the European Union, Western Europe and the United States are a broadly studied phenomenon, previous research has largely neglected the emergence of interest groups in the post-communist context. On the one hand, organized interests can be seen as a precondition of democracy. On the other hand, Central and Eastern Europe is burdened with a legacy of forced membership in communist organizations, and thus a wide-spread aversion to the political process and associational activities. In short, civil society is viewed as underdeveloped (Howard 2003). However, the strength of organized interests and civil society in the region may well be underestimated. EU accession negotiations brought about a new array of organized interests at the national level aiming to impact the negotiation process. Accession led to processes of diffusion, learning, adaptation to European models and repertoires for interest representation in post-communist political arenas (Grabbe 2001). Contrarily, some research has shown that Central and Eastern European interest groups have shifted their lobbying activities to Brussels and thus potentially altered national opportunity structures (Pérez-Solórzano Borrogán 2004). Thus, it remains unexplored how the structure and means of influence of organized interests have evolved as a result of European integration. In our paper we analyse the existing national databases and membership registries of interest organizations (unions, lobby groups, NGOs pursuing policy advocacy, pressure groups, business associations, employer’s organizations, etc.) to test how demand and supply side factors and Europeanization affect interest organization density in energy and economic policy in Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. A comparative case study design makes it possible to test institutional differences. The inclusion of a highly regulatory and Europeanized policy field, energy policy, and distributive and mostly national economic policies allows us to study the effects of Europeanization on the population ecology and the differences between regulatory and distributive policy domains.