Interest groups and political parties in Central and Eastern Europe

In many democratic systems, there is a tradition of interactions between political parties and interest organizations. However, for the CEE region, the factors driving such contacts remain partially undiscovered. Therefore, taking the organized interests’ perspective, we examine what factors influence the frequency of contacts with political parties, what types of parties are most attractive to groups and what kind of interest groups’ resources facilitates such contacts. 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, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. The results show that nearly half of interest groups in the region do not form any lobby routines with political parties, which is similar to the results of recent research in long-established democracies. However, regarding the other half, we see different patterns of contact depending on the country. The article finds strong support for the importance of the dominant party status for interest groups, but not necessarily for the number of seats that party holds in the parliament. Against the background of a fairly balanced picture of the Czech Republic and Slovenia, our results indicate extremely different attitudes of interest groups toward political parties in Hungary and Poland, countries willingly juxtaposed with each other in recent years. The results for Poland clearly show that the stronger the party's position and the greater the number of its seats in parliament, the greater the interest of the groups in contact. On the contrary, in Hungary groups rather declare contacts with opposition parties and those with a small and medium number of seats in parliament. Regarding the importance of resources, we found that among the three types of analyzed resources—financial horizon, different types of expertise and participation in umbrella organizations—only the last two are relevant.