It Is All About Money! What Drives Interest Groups’ Relations with Political Parties in Central and Eastern Europe?
| Author | Paweł Kamiński |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221084167 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221084167
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(2) 321 –339
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299221084167
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It Is All About Money! What
Drives Interest Groups’
Relations with Political Parties
in Central and Eastern Europe?
Paweł Kamiński
Abstract
This article studies contacts between interest groups and political parties. Existing research
suggests that times of close and formal cooperation between parties and groups in Western
Europe are over as the contacts have become more pragmatic and sometimes spontaneous.
Studies usually point to ideological proximity and resource exchange as the main factors behind
contacts, however, focusing mainly on parties’ power and ideological position. Here, by drawing on
data from Poland, Slovenia, and Lithuania, we focus on young democracies from Eastern Europe by
taking into account interest groups’ resources, their typology, and the system of interest groups’
representation. The article shows that financial resources are the main factor behind seeking
contacts with the large number of political parties.
Keywords
interest groups, political parties, civil society, Central-Eastern Europe
Accepted: 11 February 2022
Introduction
Interest groups and political parties are two phenomena that used to be studied separately;
however, the recent wave of studies attempted to shed more light on interactions between
these two actors or study them together (Allern, 2010; Allern and Bale, 2012; Allern
et al., 2021a, 2021b; Berkhout et al., 2021; Beyers et al., 2015; Bolleyer and Correa,
2020; De Bruycker, 2016; Otjes and Rasmussen, 2017; Rasmussen and Lindeboom,
2013).
As there is a sudden revival of the party–group studies, scholars often look only at
links between political parties and their collateral organizations, or the specific arrange-
ments (e.g. neo-corporatist vs pluralist). However, the salience of such—often centuries-
long—relationships has recently waned (Katz and Mair, 1995). Parties still interact with
Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland
Corresponding author:
Pawel Kaminski, Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, 00-625 Warszawa, Poland.
Email: p.kaminski@alumni.uj.edu.pl
1084167PSW0010.1177/14789299221084167Political Studies ReviewKaminski
research-article2022
Article
322 Political Studies Review 21(2)
groups but in a less structured and institutionalized way. Contacts between groups are
less frequent, usually ad hoc, and consist of occasional meeting and campaigns (Otjes
and Rasmussen, 2017).
One important puzzle is to explain the rationale behind contacts between political par-
ties and interest groups. First, it is reasonable to expect that in less institutionalized socie-
ties and political systems, most groups should lobby parties irrespectively of ideological
distance. This should happen due to the lack of preexisting partisan loyalties, as almost all
political parties and interest groups were established after 1989 (Mair, 1997). Second,
organizational networks promoting and sustaining collective interests—like trade unions
or anti-Communist and civil rights organizations—quickly lost political significance
(Howard, 2003; Ost, 2018).1 Finally, Poland, Slovenia, and Lithuania have developed
multi-party systems, where usually parties need to build coalitions to form a government.
Hence, it might be relevant to interact with parties that represent different political views,
but which have the power to shape public policy (Marshall, 2015).
In this article, we argue that potentially country context, group type, financial means,
and other factors affect interest group–party linkage. This calls for a research design that
incorporates as many of these dimensions as possible in a single study. Thanks to the data
collected in a recent research project—the Comparative Interest Groups Survey—this
article presents such analysis of interest groups–party contacts in Poland, Lithuania, and
Slovenia, based on cross-national surveys of almost 1200 organizations.
The study adds knowledge to the sparse literature on interest groups and political par-
ties in post-Communist Central Europe. More importantly, it shows that interest groups
and political parties are still in contact but in a less frequent and structured way. More
importantly, it is demonstrated that interest groups’ financial power plays a dominant role
in predicting contact with political parties. Moreover, the corporatist Slovene system
demonstrates lower levels of interest group–party contacts than pluralist Poland and
Lithuania.
We also found no evidence that group typology predicts contacts with political parties.
Taking into account the robustness of financial power, it would mean that inequality is
distributed across different group types.
We conceive an interest group to be “an association of individuals or organiza-
tions, usually formally organized, that attempts to influence public policy” (Thomas,
2004: 123). On the contrary, a political party is “any political group that presents at
elections , and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office”
(Sartori, 1976: 64).
The article is structured as follows. First, we clarify what it is understood as “contact”
between groups and parties. Second, we provide an overview of democratic transforma-
tion and highlight the differences in the evolution of civil society and political parties
between Western Europe and Central-Eastern Europe. Finally, we investigate the factors
behind the patterns of interactions between different types of interest groups and political
parties through multivariate analysis.
Conceptualizing Party-Group Contacts
What could be understood as a relationship between interest groups and political parties
has been under debate. As Allern and Bale (2012) argue, the term is vague and is used in
many contexts. Allern et al. (2021b), in an attempt to clarify the conceptualization, sug-
gest that “relationship” should be used to more structured and reciprocal circumstances
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