Exploring interest intermediation in Central and Eastern Europe: is higher education different?

Higher education interest groups remain somewhat understudied from a comparative theory-driven perspective. This is surprising because political decisions regarding higher education must increasingly be legitimized to students, taxpayers, the academic community and society. This article aims to advance our understanding of higher education stakeholders in post-communist Europe. In our view, the region deserves more attention, not least because students and academics were very instrumental in bringing down communism and institutionalizing democracy. First, we draw on Klemenčič’s (EJHE 2(1): 2–19, 2012; SHE 39(3):396–411, 2014) distinction between corporatist and pluralist as well as formalized and informal systems of representation in higher education. Looking at survey data from four countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia—we examine to what extent post-communist democracies have established corporatist institutions to facilitate the formal participation of various crucial stakeholder organizations, e.g. students’ unions, academic unions, rectors’ conferences, etc. Then we address whether higher education organizations enjoy privileged access to policy-makers compared to those from other policy areas, while engaging with the argument that higher education is a particular case of “stakeholder democracy” in a region otherwise characterized by weak civic participation and corporatism. To wrap up, we discuss different “mutations of higher education corporatism” in each country.

Towards energy policy corporatism in Central and Eastern Europe?

This paper contributes to our understanding of interest intermediation structures in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and, specifically, whether, which, how and to what extent organized interests are incorporated into policy-making processes. Unlike previous studies primarily focusing on patterns of economic coordination (Jahn 2016), we focus on energy policy-making in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. We address the extent to which these energy interest intermediation systems are gravitating towards a more corporatist policy-making paradigm and whether corporatist arrangements have been dismantled in view of the new wave of national conservatism in CEE. We offer a complex operationalization of corporatism based on concrete indicators and present the results of a survey of energy interest groups operating in the region. It covers questions regarding interest intermediation between the organized interests and the government, regulatory authorities as well as the degree of policy coordination and political exchange with the state and between rivalling organizations, enabling us to derive a “corporatism score” for each national institutional setting and discuss them in the light of Jahn’s (2016) corporatism rankings for the region. We show that—despite striking differences—at least rudimentary corporatist interest intermediation structures have emerged with some variations of pluralism and statism in all four countries.