Filling the Blanks Project

Filling the Blanks

Empirical analysis of the complex relationships between political parties, organized interest groups and civil society in the postcommunist Eastern and Central Europe

Filling the Blanks 

This website contains information about the research project Filling the Blanks hosted by Institute of Political Studies of Polish Academy of Sciences and financed by the Polish National Science Centre. The aim of the project is to study the relationship between interest groups and political parties in Poland, Slovenia, Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the project we are planning to examine the evolution of interest groups  in the region of Central Europe in the context of the processes of "democratic backsliding," illiberalism or, eventually, the cartelization of political parties. This will require examining entire populations, as well as the ideological spaces occupied by the civic organizations. Do they overlap with political parties? Or do they fill niches left by political parties, which are increasingly becoming independent of voters? We are also interested in the interactions between the two actors - above all, their frequency and form. What factors influence cooptation, and what might influence that parties and groups live in parallel worlds? The project involves collaboration between scholars from four countries: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Research team

Paweł Kamiński

Paweł Kamiński is Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences. His main research interests include political parties and civil society in Central Eastern Europe; and the relationships between political parties and interest groups.

Meta Novak

Meta Novak is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a researcher at the Centre for Political Science Research in the same faculty. Her research interests include interest groups; lobbying; civil society; political knowledge and opinion gaps.

Szczepan Czarnecki

Szczepan Czarnecki is an Assistant at the Department of Sociology and the Cultural Anthropology at the Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic and researcher in the Filling the Blanks project at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Previously engaged in the research project “Missing Link”: Exploring Organized Interests in Post-Communist Policy Making.

Peter Čuroš

Peter Čuroš is  Adjunct at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He has published on critical legal theory, judicial reforms, legal ideology, the judiciary in CEE, judicial ethics, legal education. At PAN he is a member of the project Filling the gap – an empirical analysis of the complex relations between political parties, organized interests.

Selected Publications

Previous works of the project members

1. Kamiński, P. (2023). It Is All About Money! What Drives Interest Groups’ Relations with Political Parties in Central and Eastern Europe?. Political Studies Review, 21(2), 321-339.

2. Rozbicka, P., & Kamiński, P. (2022). Have they already emerged? Mapping the population of national interest organisations in post-communist Poland. Europe-Asia Studies, 74(5), 789-808.

3. Kamiński, P., & Riedel, R. (2021). When illiberalism looms-mortality anxiety and the perceived existential threat among Polish and Slovenian interest groups. Interest Groups & Advocacy, 10, 454-477.

4. Rozbicka, P., Kamiński, P., Novak, M., & Jankauskaitė, V. (2021). Achieving democracy through interest representation. Springer International Publishing.

5. Czarnecki, S., Piotrowska, E. Interest groups and political parties in Central and Eastern Europe. Int Groups Adv 10, 376–398 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-021-00139-8

6. Czarnecki S. (2021). In Search of Civic Participation: Advocacy tactics in the energy and environmental sector in post-communist Europe, in: M. Dobbins & R. Riedel (Eds.), Exploring Organized Interests in Post - Communist Policy - Making: The “Missing Link. Routledge.

7. Labanino, R. P., Dobbins, M., Czarnecki, S., & Železnik, A. (2021). Explaining the Formation Rates of Post-Communist Interest Organizations: Density Dependence and Political Opportunity Structure. East European Politics and Societies, 35(4), 1043-1067. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325420950809

8. Dobbins, M., Labanino, R.P., Riedel, R. et al. Organized interests in post-communist policy-making: a new dataset for comparative research. Int Groups Adv 12, 73–101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-022-00172-1 
Contact:

info@igresearch.edu.pl
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