Political Parties and Interest Groups in Czechia and Slovakia - three decades after the Velvet divorce

In the democratic systems, there is a tradition of interactions between political parties and interest groups; nonetheless, the research on CEE region in this field appears to remain largely unexplored. Although, there were a preliminary studies focused on the contacts of Interest organizations and political parties in East and Central Europe (Czarnecki, Szyszkowska 2020), but the case of Slovakia has not been included in any of these studies. While the case of Slovakia is a singular instance, it certainly becomes more significant if compared to its neighbor to the west, the Czech Republic, particularly in context of the velvet separation of Czechoslovakia that occurred thirty years ago. Czechia and Slovakia have a lengthy common history up to 1993. The two countries were a part of the Austria-Hungary empire before the First Czechoslovak Republic was established in 1918. Following World War II, they both faced communism as one entity. Despite having similar histories, the two entities' developmental paths have varied since 1993. Nevertheless, after splitting apart both countries joined the EU (2004) and NATO - which validated their approaches toward democratic development. Therefore, taking the organized interests’ perspective, in this paper I examine what factors influence the frequency of contacts with political parties in Czech Republic and Slovakia, what types of parties are most attractive to the interest groups and what kind of interest groups’ resources facilitates such contacts, and how their systems are open to the civic society after the three decades from their velvet divorce. The study relies on data from a large-scale survey of organized interests, bringing in a comparative perspective of the four selected countries: Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.