Between 1945 and 2010 three main types of corporatism were discussed in the political science literature: the ‘classic’ and ‘lean’ corporatism that existed in the West European countries and the ‘illusory’ corporatism that dominated in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The aim of the paper is to examine whether a new version of corporatism, which I call ‘patronage’ corporatism, emerged in Hungary and Poland during the first term of the governments formed by populist political parties (in Hungary between 2010 and 2014 and in Poland between 2015 and 2019). In patronage corporatism the authorities autonomously conduct heterodox economic policy. They enter into alliances only with ideologically close trade unions. While their cronies legitimize authorities’ decisions at the governmental level vis-à-vis the citizens and at the international level, the government fulfils some of their socio-economic and organizational demands. Furthermore, the government cooperates with its allies to destroy other trade unions that are perceived as hostile towards the authorities. The paper shows that the capture of power by populist parties in Hungary and Poland led to the development of patronage corporatism in these countries.

This article examines the effectiveness of grassroots lobbying at the regional level in Poland. For the purpose of the article, “loyalty to the citizens versus party theory” was formulated. It distinguishes two stages of the policy-making process within which the councilors react differently to grassroots lobbying. The first stage refers to the preparation of the law by the region’s board. The theory assumes that the more people pressure the legislator to persuade the board to their initiative, the more inclined he is to endorse it. This way he proves loyalty to the citizens and secures his reelection. The second stage concerns the legislators’ voting behavior. In this case, grassroots lobbying has a neutral impact on them. The councilors remain loyal to the party leaders and vote accordingly so that their position on the party list is guaranteed in the next election. In order to verify the theory, a study consisting of anonymous interviews with sixty legislators from the Opole and Subcarpathian Assembly was conducted. The outcome of the research indicates that (1) a considerable majority of legislators were positively influenced by grassroots lobbying to pressure the region’s board; (2) the voting behavior of the majority of legislators was not impacted by grassroots lobbying; (3) grassroots lobbying is the most effective at the first stage of the policy-making process; (4) the structure of government does not determine the legislators’ reaction to grassroots lobbying; (5) the party’s status (in power or in opposition) impacts the legislator’s voting behavior.

It seems to be a truism to say that we should pay more and more attention to network traffic safety. Such a goal may be achieved with many different approaches. In this paper, we put our attention on the increase in network traffic safety based on the continuous monitoring of network traffic statistics and detecting possible anomalies in the network traffic description. The developed solution, called the anomaly detection module, is mostly dedicated to public institutions as the additional component of the network security services. Despite the use of well-known anomaly detection methods, the novelty of the module is based on providing an exhaustive strategy of selecting the best combination of models as well as tuning the models in a much faster offline mode. It is worth emphasizing that combined models were able to achieve 100% balanced accuracy level of specific attack detection.

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