This book examines organized interests in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), providing incisive analyses in three critically important policy areas - healthcare, higher education and energy. The four countries surveyed - Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic - afford rich diversity offering broad empirical material available for cross-country and cross-policy comparative analyses. Featuring interdisciplinary research, the book draws together recent developments in the evolution of post-communist advocacy organizations, their population ecology dynamics, interest intermediation, the influence of organized interests and their (bottom-up and top-down) Europeanization. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Central and Eastern European politics, interest groups and lobbying, post-communism, transition and consolidation studies, and more broadly to European studies/politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003049562, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book examines organized interests in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), providing incisive analyses in three critically important policy areas - healthcare, higher education and energy. The four countries surveyed - Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic - afford rich diversity offering broad empirical material available for cross-country and cross-policy comparative analyses. Featuring interdisciplinary research, the book draws together recent developments in the evolution of post-communist advocacy organizations, their population ecology dynamics, interest intermediation, the influence of organized interests and their (bottom-up and top-down) Europeanization. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Central and Eastern European politics, interest groups and lobbying, post-communism, transition and consolidation studies, and more broadly to European studies/politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at: http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003049562, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

It is frequently assumed that intergovernmental negotiations in the European Union will become more tedious and complex in light of the growing number of states and interests. The goal of this study is to measure the preferences of the new member states along several individual political dimensions in the EU and to compare these preferences with those of the current members. On the basis of the data gathered through interviews and structural statistics, prognoses will be made on the further course of integration along several important conflict dimensions in EU decision making. This analysis serves to establish whether such conflict lines will be intensified and whether the previous voting coalitions in the Council of Ministers will be modified in the course of enlargement. The ultimate aim is then to present different decision making scenarios for individual policy areas so that future developments in the EU can be anticipated and modelled.