The polity, population and organizational level determinants of inter-group cooperation

What factors prompt interest groups to cooperate with other groups? Over the past 30 years, a handful of scholars have tackled this question and generated often-contrasting findings. While some studies focus on the influence of organizational type (e.g. peak vs. specialized, business vs. civic groups) (e.g. Salisbury 1987), others emphasize issue-related factors such as salience (e.g. Mahoney 2007; De Bruycker & Beyers 2017), the intensity of group preferences (e.g. Holyoke 2009) or political opposition to a policy proposal (Hojnacki 1997) as key variables. Other authors argue that increased efforts at coalition formation are ultimately a strategic weapon of groups at risk of failure (Hanegraaff & Pritoni 2020; Mahoney & Baumgartner 2004). Based on resource dependency theory (Pfeffer & Salancik 2003; Lowery 2007), we argue that inter-group cooperation is a key strategy against environmental uncertainties. We focus on the post-communist context while drawing on our original organizational survey dataset of more than 400 Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Slovenian interest organizations (Dobbins et al. 2023). Against the background of historically weak civil societies, organized interests in the region face unique challenges. These are only compounded by a region-wide trend towards democratic backsliding, illiberalism, and closing political opportunity structures. Yet recent scholarship has demonstrated the value of inter-organizational cooperation for access to policy-makers and organizational professionalization (e.g., Dobbins et al. 2022). We analyze how strategic inter-organizational cooperation in funding, political representation, joint strategies and statements is driven by four main factors: 1) organizational resources, 2) democratic backsliding, 3) expertise provision 4) as well as organizational density. We postulate that weakly-endowed organizations are more prone to cooperate to ensure their survival by bundling resources. Yet, we also put forward the counter-hypothesis that greater organizational resources not only boost organizations’ capacity for action, but also decrease their risk adversity, thus enhancing their willingness to engage in inter-organizational cooperation, while also testing whether member fees and/or state funding are decisive. Member fees may go hand in hand with more internal democracy and hence less leeway for organizations to compromise with others, while state-funded organizations may perceive no need to cooperate. As for the democratic backsliding context, we argue that both more “oppositional organizations” (i.e., closer ties to the opposition than governing parties), as well as those perceiving a closure of the political space are more likely to cooperate with others as an act of “defiant responsiveness”. Regarding expertise, in a previous analysis we found that inter-group cooperation enhanced expertise provision. However, groups may prefer to keep their exclusive expertise for themselves and the policy-makers they access and hence not see any value in cooperation. Finally, we test for density to explore whether groups employ cooperation as a strategy against an increasingly “overcrowded” organizational population (i.e., more competition for scarce resources). To put our findings on more solid ground, we also test for organizational age (i.e. new organizations may need to cooperate to survive, while old organizations can fall back on pre-existing clientelistic networks) and organizational type (diffuse civic interests vs. business interests).