Explaining the density of post-communist interest group populations—resources, constituencies, and regime change

Abstract

The article tests the energy–stability–area (ESA) model of interest group population density on a sample of different 2018 Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian energy, higher education and health care interest organisation populations. The unique context of recent simultaneous political, economic and in the cases of Czechia and Slovenia, national transitions present a hard test for population ecology theory. Besides the area (constituency size) and energy (resources, issue certainty) terms, the article brings the stability term back into the center of analysis. The stability term, that is, the effect of a profound change or shock to the polity is operationalised as Communist-era population densities. As all three policy domains are heavily state controlled and tightly regulated, the effect of neocorporatist interest intermediation is also tested. The article finds strong support for the energy and neocorporatism hypotheses and provides evidence for the effect of communist-era organisational population density on post-transition densities: The size of 2018 organisational populations is found to be dependent on pre-transition densities. The relationship is, however, not linear but curvilinear. Nevertheless, the analysis indicates that the effect of pre-transition population size is moderated by other environmental level factors.

Organized interests in post-communist policy-making: a new dataset for comparative research

“…And, critically, at what point did organizational populations become density-dependent (Hannan and Carroll 1992 )? The dataset enables us to trace how various shifts in the political opportunity structure, i.e., political opening, political closure, but also media attention on related policy issues (Labanino et al 2021a ) drove organizational formations, as well as factors determining population density (Labanino et al 2021b ).…”

“…Table 1 provides a simple breakdown of our organizational population. Of the 1590 identified organizations, 1345 were active in 2018, and a total of 264 organizations in the sample were founded in or before 1989 (for organizations from the pre-communist and communist phase, see Labanino et al 2021b ).…”

The Representative Potential of Interest Groups: Internal Voice in Post-Communist and Western European Countries

“…We assume that the start date of interest organisational systems largely mirrors the politicalinstitutional upheaval of 1989. This assumption is similar to Olson's (1982) choice to use the end of the Second World War as the starting date for investigating the German interest group system (see also Labanino et al, 2021;Unger & van Waarden, 1999). This choice means that the Central and Eastern European systems have had around 30 years to develop, whereas the systems of the other countries studied have had around 70 years (although the "age" of the Portuguese system in our sample falls somewhat outside this pattern).…”

Lobbyierende Kantone

“…Osteuropas zunehmend aus der Warte der Interessengruppen-und Lobbyingforschung erschlossen (u. a. Dobbins und Riedel, 2021;Labanino et al, 2021). In konzeptionell-theoretischer Hinsicht kamen im Laufe der Jahrzehnte zahlreiche Arbeiten hinzu, welche Interessenvertretung theoretisierten -wahlweise als «communication process» (Milbrath, 1960), als ein auf Langfristigkeit angelegtes Tauschgeschäft zwischen Lobbyierenden und Lobbyierten («exchange theory»; Salisbury, 1969), als einem «Eisernen Dreieck» («iron triangle») gleichende Verflechtung zwischen Politik, Bürokratie und Interessengruppen (Adams, 1984), als Informationsübermittlung (Austen- Grossman und Helpman, 2001;Baumgartner und Jones, 2015), als ein quasinatürliches Koalieren thematisch geordneter «issue networks» (Heclo, 1978) bzw.…”