Wartime Lobbying: How Full-Scale War Impacts Interest Group Mobilization in Ukraine

There is a growing consensus that Ukrainian civil society is exceptionally resilient compared to other post-communist states (Worschech 2017) – and that the Russian invasion has given a major boost to Ukrainian civil society activism (Zarembo & Martin 2024). However, interest group research has so far overlooked Ukraine. This is surprising due to its tumultuous political trajectory, but above all the resilience and clout attested to Ukrainian civil society. After all, Ukraine presents a particularly fascinating case of large-scale political democratization amid the reality of a full-scale war of aggression. This presents a highly unique, but also treacherous lobbying environment, as Ukrainian interest groups are coping with up to five (!) simultaneous critical junctures: the Euromaidan revolution and democratization (since 2014), large-scale political decentralization (since 2014), a full-scale war of aggression (since 2022), the adoption of new lobbying legislation (2024) as well as the massive reduction of USAID funding (2025). Against this background and drawing on Lowery’s theory of lobbying (2017), we are conducting a survey of all (approx. 2000) registered and active Ukrainian interest organizations with a national-level orientation. The survey focuses on the impact of the above-mentioned critical junctures on four central dimensions 1) organizational “niche-seeking”, 2) organizations’ engagement with policy-makers 3) inter-group cooperation strategies and 4) and internal organizational development. Due to the volatility of the situation and freshness of the data, the proposed paper takes a deliberately exploratory approach. Simply put, we focus on how Ukrainian interest organizations are adopting to the reality of full-scale war and how the war has impacted the state’s level of engagement with organized interests. We first examine how the full-scale invasion has affected organizational populations (i.e. their diversity and density) and to what extent organizations are seizing on new political issues to maintain political access and hold their membership base together. Secondly, we are interested in whether and how full-scale war (amid simultaneous democratization and administrative modernization processes) has altered organized interests’ channels of political access to state institutions. What internal organizational factors (e.g., resources, membership, expertise, professionalization, new issue-seeking strategies) facilitate political inclusion and to what types of organizations is the state particularly receptive in the war-time context? Third, we focus on the formation of organizational coalitions as a potential crisis-coping strategy. Finally, we present data on internal organizational development strategies: To what extent has full-scale war boosted the professionalization and/or internal democratic-participative character of Ukrainian interest groups? Our preliminary data paint a multi-faceted picture: we find strong evidence of the positive impact of the acute crisis situation on internal professionalization and inter-organizational cooperation, whereby organizations are also increasingly also assuming state-like tasks, simply because the state is overburdened elsewhere. At the same time, we find little to no change with regard to political dialogue, participation and access. In other words, accusations of a breakdown of democratic quality during war appear to be heavily exaggerated, as the state continues to heavily engage with interest groups of multiple couleurs.