The effectiveness of grassroots lobbying at the regional level in Poland. The cases of Opole and Podkarpackie Region

The impact of grassroots lobbying on the legislators’ behavior is an issue which has not been examined in the Central and Eastern Europe. The goal of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of this phenomenon at the regional level in Poland. The studies on the effectiveness of grassroots lobbying were conducted primarily in the US’ states. We can distinguish two major approaches prevalent in the academic discourse that contradict each other. Supporters of the signalling theory believe that grassroots lobbying has a positive effect on the legislators’ voting behaviour. However, supporters of the economic theory of political information maintain that grassroots lobbying can exert a negative effect on the legislators’ voting behaviour on lower salience issues, while it has no impact on higher salience issues. None of these approaches can be adapted to the studies on the effectiveness of grassroots lobbying in the Polish regions because of the disparities between the Polish regional assembly and the US’ state assembly in terms of their competences and the nature of the electoral and political systems. Therefore, a new theory (“the loyalty to the citizens versus party theory”) was formed. It assumes that we can distinguish two stages of policy-making at the regional level in Poland, within which the legislators react differently to grassroots lobbying. The first stage refers to the preparation of the law by the Marshal of the voivodship. The more people pressure the legislator to persuade the Marshal to their political initiative, the more willing the legislator is to fulfill their demand. The number of people influencing the legislator signals him the salience of the issue. The more citizens act, the higher it becomes. The legislator has to remain loyal to the citizens and try to fulfill such pleas to get reelected. The second stage of policy-making refers to the legislators’ voting behavior. In this case grassroots lobbying has a neutral impact on the legislators. The scale of the action is irrelevant. The legislators remain loyal to the party leaders and vote as they demand, because they do not want to be removed from the party’s list and lose their chance to be reelected. In order to verify a new theory, I conducted anonymous interviews with 30 legislators from the Opole and Podkarpacie regional chamber each. The selection of these voivodships was intentional. They were the most opposite cases from the Polish regions. The Podkarpacie region is the only voivodship in which one political party (PiS) won an absolute majority of seats in the assembly in the 2014 and 2018 elections and single-handedly formed the regional government. The Opole voivodship is the sole region, in which three parties (PO/KO, PSL and the German Minority) that competed with each other in the 2014 and 2018 elections, formed the regional government later on. The comparative analysis of these cases (the “most different cases” method) allowed me to establish whether the structure of the government (one-party majority vs multi-party majority government) determined the effectiveness of grassroots lobbying.