Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

AGNIESZKA REFERENCES LITERATUR K. CIANCIARA
international consultancies are concentrated
on public relations, media relations, or crisis
management communication, only occasionally
dealing with actual lobbying (Matraszek,
24.08.2009). The relatively new phenomenon
concerns the quasi-lobbying activities of law
firms that provide clients with legal arguments
and expertise necessary to influence the
decision-making process. We thus observe a
certain degree of professionalization in terms
of argumentation, but not of the core formal
and informal institutions that define businesspolitics
relations and access to decisionmakers.
Large parts of the business elite are
still interdependent and closely linked with
personal ties to the world of politics, thus
lacking autonomous status.
At the same time, new members of the
business elite emerged in the aftermath of the
post-accession economic boom. The 1998-
2002 economic crisis, together with new
opportunities offered by the single market,
have enabled growth of private companies that
disposed of real competitive advantage. In the
rankings of fastest growing firms, a substantial
change is also evident, as the new generation
of successful businessmen is too young to have
been socialized in the former system, as well as
benefit from the early transformation period,
its unclear rules and ambiguous opportunities.
This part of the elite demonstrates a high
degree of autonomy from the political elite, but
also avoids active participation in any forms of
collective action and interest representation.
To sum up, various forms of business-politics
relations co-exist in Poland, depending on sector,
ownership structure, size and resources of the
company, as well as socialization background
of management. Consequently, heterogeneity
reigns among the business elite, where some
groups demonstrate characteristics typical for
the (early) transformation period, whereas
others belong to the modern, internationalized
elite of consolidated capitalist system.
However, this partial consolidation seems not
yet to be translated into mobilization and
effective lobbying of Polish business interests
at the EU level. Consequently, I argue
that the short period of participation and
learning process within the EU governance
structures (after accession in 2004) cannot be
seen as the main explanatory factor. Nor do
the critical resources (Beyers & Kerremans,
2007) such as membership density, funding
and sector consolidation provide sufficient
explanation in the case of mobilization and
impact exerted at the EU level by economic
interest groups coming from post-communist
CEE member states. It appears that postcommunist
formal and informal heritage
still plays an important role in businesspolitics
relations. In the Polish case, this is
manifested in the degree of embeddedness in
domestic clientelistic and oligarchic networks,
level of internationalization and resulting
autonomy vis-a-vis national political elites, as
well as lack of tradition, institutionalization
and legitimization of pluralist interest
representation.
EXPLAINING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF
POLISH BUSINESS LOBBYING AT THE
EU LEVEL
Studies on Europeanization of interest groups
suggest that membership density, funding and
sector consolidation constitute critical factors
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