Some Effects of Interest Group Strength in State Politics

The literature on interest groups is, by and large, either heavily abstract and theoretical or highly concrete and descriptive. There are, on the one hand, several attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the study of interest groups, the major foci being either “the group basis of politics” or “mass society.” On the other hand are numerous case-studies which describe in some detail, either for a particular policy or for a particular interest group, relevant political activities which lead to inferred conclusions about the impact that such groups have on the issue or issues. What we lack, and what is needed to raise the study of interest groups to the level of empiricallybased generalization, are studies which collect data and generalize about interest groups using multiple units of analysis. This observation is not meant to depreciate or undervalue the important theoretical and descriptive contributions which have been made in the examination of the role of interest groups in governmental systems. It is simply to state a fact about the literature and to plead for more systematic data collection and empirically-based generalization from which verified propositions about interest groups may emerge. I think there are two major reasons why the literature on interest groups lacks a comparative base. First, many of the concepts which are employed in theories about interest groups are difficult to operationalize for data collection. Such concepts as “cohesion,” “access,” “resources,” etc., represent complex phenomena and would involve a good deal of effort to apply rigorously and empirically.