Explaining Interest Organization Population Density Across Public and Business Sector Domains in Post-Communist EU Member States

The Energy-Stability-Area (ESA) model on the determinants of the size of interest organization populations by Lowery and Grey (1995) has become a standard in political science in the past 24 years. However, the model has not been tested on post-communist interest organization populations. This is all the more surprising as the post-communist environment offers a very rigorous test for the model. First of all, the stability variable, which has been constant for the American states (Gray and Lowery 1996) and fairly constant in the Western European examples, is much more problematic in the post-Communist context. Following Olson (1982), the stability term of the model was tested by Lowery and Gray (1995) with the age of interest systems, which in the case of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries is just 29 years. Moreover, many interest organizations active during communism survived transition, that is, there was no clean slate, which must be controlled for. The EU accession process also potentially affected both the stability and the energy terms. One of the most important variables testing the energy term is issue certainty, measured by intensity of party competition by Lowery and Grey (1995). CEE party systems are highly competitive, the cost of governance has been much higher than in established democracies, and CEE party systems have been highly volatile. That is, whether issue uncertainty in such an environment is a resource for interest organization mobilization must be carefully operationalized and tested. Furthermore, all CEE countries implemented neo-corporatist interest intermediation structures, which since the 2000s have been gradually weakened. These changes from neo-corporatism towards pluralism or statism must also be incorporated in the model. We test the ESA model on a sample of Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian energy policy, higher education and healthcare interest organization populations. Both the countries and the chosen policies vary on the theoretically most important variables. While all the four countries are former communist dictatorships that went through a simultaneous dual, economic and political transition and were subject to the same external pressures (most notably the EU accession process), they represent different levels of institutionalization of party systems, interest intermediation structures and pre-democratic transition interest organization landscapes (ranging from the already fragmented Hungarian to the polarized communist vs anti-communist Polish one). The three policy fields cover both business and public interests, and were subject to different levels of Europeanization pressures.