Designed for Difficulties: A Case Study of the Institutional Design of a European Level Youth Lobby Group from a Post-Socialist State

Zoe Onutu, University of Babes-Bolyai
Dylan Kissane, University of South Australia

Abstract

Recent research suggests that there are a number of significant issues faced by lobby groups from the European Union’s post-socialist sphere when attempting to influence policy at a European level. Specifically, the research highlights four major factors which prevent lobbyists from achieving their ends: inexperience among lobbyists entailed by the absence of a lobbying tradition, insufficient resources, a domestic – rather than European – focus and an underdeveloped institutional capacity to learn from experiences at the European level. However, while such factors have been found to exist broadly for lobby groups from Europe’s post-socialist private sector, there has not yet been an assessment of the validity of such conclusions for the sub-sector of post-socialist youth lobby groups. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature through a case study consideration of the International Association for Political Science Students (IAPSS) based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

This paper is presented in four parts. The first part introduces the specific European lobby group literature and the recent research results that suggest the four key factors that negatively impact post-socialist lobby group efforts at a European level. The second part introduces the focus of the case study, IAPSS, and presents a short précis of the Association, the goals it maintains for lobbying at a European level and the means through which these goals are pursued. The third part considers the institutional design of IAPSS in relation to the four factors outlined in part one and finds that the design of the institution itself hampers the success of its European level lobbying efforts. The fourth part of the paper is both a discussion of the findings in part three and a series of suggestions by which IAPSS might address their lobbying difficulties.