The Effects of Europeanisation on National Level Success – The Importance of EU Associations for Access and Professionalisation of Interest Groups in Central and Eastern Europe

Fraussen et al. (2015) showed that umbrella organizations are essential for lobbying success on the EU level, as they are five times more likely to gain access in Brussels than other interest groups. Based on a survey of 1500 interest groups in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia and Lithuania Hanegraaff and Ploeg (2018) found that membership in an EU-level umbrella organization is the key to access to EU policy makers for national interest groups. Moreover, the effects of of financial resources and the level of professionalization on EU-level access were also contingent on membership in EU-level umbrella associations. However, in our paper we reverse the question and ask whether Europeanization affects the success of interest groups on the national level in Central and Eastern Europe. That is, we seek to measure the effect of membership in EU-level umbrella associations on the professionalization and financial stability of national interest organizations, and on their access to national policy makers. We base our analysis on a currently ongoing online survey of national level Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian interest groups in three policy areas, higher education, energy policy and healthcare. The composition of the sample allows us to both control for different national institutional setups crucial for interest intermediation, and for a different level of Europeanization by policy areas. Fink-Hafner (2000) found that in Slovenia as a candidate-state European interest groups (both Euro-groups and kindred interest groups from EU member-states) had a significant impact by supporting Slovenian interest groups in agenda-setting and all other key stages in Slovenian policy-making and policy implementation. However, the hypothesis has never been tested in a comparative setting on the sample of new member states and different interest group populations. The findings of this research are of crucial theoretical importance for the Europeanization of interest groups in Central and Eastern Europe, as it has been argued that the Europeanization process has resulted in the strengthening of central executives to the detriment of civil society interests (Goetz and Wollmann 2001). Many researchers found that organized interests were weak and fragmented in the post-communist world (Grzymała-Busse 2003; Pérez-Solórzano Borragán 2004). By contrast, Fink-Hafner (1998) contends that Central and Eastern Europe is experiencing the “reinvention of civil society”, reflected in new forms and strategies of collective interest representation. This view is backed by a growing number of analyses on the density of membership in civic organizations (Petrova and Tarrow 2007; Howard 2003) and their increasing representation in parliament (Fink-Hafner 2011).