Advocacy Organisations in CEE Healthcare – Does Expertise Matter?

Healthcare advocacy organizations are relatively new phenomenon in CEE countries. However, interests groups vary substantially regard to their internal resources and the type of issues which they represent. The role of professional expertise in measuring the access and the impact of healthcare advocacy organizations across CEE have not yet attracted much attention in academic research. Resources of such formations can refer to financing, public support or even outside input and information (Dür & De Bièvre 2007). Expertise and specialist knowledge is a specific type of resource too. Meanwile, it may seem that in face of populism, fake news and democratic backsliding, organizations who use hard facts, expertise and scientific data are not the ones who are the most influential on agenda-setting processes. The paper will have two main objectives. The first is to assess quantitatively the level of proffessionalization of healthcare advocacy organizations in selected CEE countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) with the special interest in expertise-ability. The second is to assess the corelation between expertise and the level of involvement in policy-making processes. It also highlights the vivid importance of ability to develop professional expertise by different advocacy groups in healthcare ecosystems across CEE. Main research question are: Is power in advocacy could be perceived to be a result of such factors as expertise, concentration of interests, size, professionalization, secured funding, strong structure, ability to build wider coalitions? Does expertise really matter or there are different determinants that corelates more with the impact on decision-making? Methodologically the paper will rely on comparative quantitative research based on results of the survey conducted among various healthcare interest groups in the four selected countries. The paper is an outcome of a research project which won a competitive bi-national grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and Polish National Science Center (NCN) entitled “The <Missing Link>: Examining organized interests in post-communist policy-making”