A Valiant, but Futile Strategy? Exploring the Benefits of Lobbying Coalitions in Central and Eastern Europe

While the determinants of cooperation between interest groups are still not fully understood, researchers have made enormous strides in understanding what motivates interest groups to join forces. Various studies highlight existential fears (Hanegraaff & Pritoni 2020), organizational resources (Junk 2020), issue salience (Mahoney & Baumgartner 2004), and organizational identity (Beyers & De Bruycker 2017), among others, as factors potentially conducive or detrimental to the formation of lobbying coalitions. So far, though, only few authors have systematically engaged with the impact of coalition-building on lobbying success. Junk (2020) enormously enhanced our understanding of this causal chain by showing that inter-group cooperation is more beneficial to interest groups with fewer economic resources than to better-endowed organizations. Specifically, cooperation can function as a resource redistribution mechanism between lobbying groups, whereby some (i.e. weakly endowed organizations) benefit more from cooperation than others. While not aiming to refute this convincing argument, we believe that population- and policy-level dynamics may also be a critical part of the link between lobbying coalitions and the benefits reaped from them. Regarding organizational populations, Hanegraaff et al. (2020) show that individual organizations face significant constraints on their lobbying capacities when operating in crowded communities with multiple groups vying for political access. When organizational populations grow, it is increasingly difficult for individual groups to “stand out from the crowd”, making lobbying together a potentially fruitful strategy to avoid being “drowned out”. Labanino and Dobbins (2024) also recently observed pronounced negative effects of deteriorating democratic quality on the overall access of interest groups to policy-makers, to which oppositional groups, in particular, have reacted by forming coalitions (Dobbins & Labanino 2024). Thus, the overall political context and interest group landscape may be key impediments or facilitators of lobbying success or failure. Against this background, we explore whether and to what extent inter-organizational cooperation can mitigate the negative effects of increasing population densities (i.e. the population level) and closing political opportunity structures (i.e. the polity-level). We focus on organizations operating in four Central and Eastern European countries, which have recently experienced both phenomena more or less simultaneously, i.e. dynamic organizational formation rates (Rozbicka et al. 2020) and democratic backsliding (Coppedge et al. 2022). The analysis provides insights on whether, for whom and to what extent lobby coalition-formation is an effective strategy for organizations to sustain political access and influence amid two simultaneous “storms” – democratic decline and rapidly changing organizational populations. The study is based on a dataset of organizational populations in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia as well as a new survey dataset, which grasps various micro-level features of organized interests (e.g. resources, size, constituencies) as well as their perceptions of political access, influence and opportunity structures. The combination of these datasets not only enables us to re-test Junk’s argument on new, relatively unexplored lobbying landscapes, but also to systematically assess the value and benefits of cooperation for organized interests and, in particular oppositional or diffuse-civic groups, in a more complex, and often increasingly hostile civic environment.