The Scale of Interest Organization in Democratic Politics : Data and Research Methods

It is widely assumed that effective democracies host large populations of pressure participants defending their interests and advancing their causes. It is also assumed that as societies develop, the associational world 'explodes'. These twin assumptions prompt simple questions. How many organized interests are there in different societies and how quickly are they growing? Do different types grow at different rates? In this volume, these questions are shown to be much more difficult to answer than they at first. However, a useful sense of scale is provided for the debate and many research practice issues are raised. Significant differences appear cross nationally but some broad trends such as a decline in the number of business groups emerge. Population ecology is used to show that the idea of constant growth was naIve. Contributions from distinguished authors include reports on data from the USA, UK, Denmark and Germany, at different levels of political decision making, from 'below the radar' in local communities to global negations at the World Trade Organization. The volume highlights the need for political science to pay more attention to complex interactions involving a 'cast of thousands' of politically relevant groups.

DARREN HALPIN Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. He was formerly Professor of Public Policy at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK, where he is now Visiting Professor at the Institute for Management, Governance and Society. GRANT JORDAN Emeritus Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, Aberdeen University, Scotland, UK. He first wrote about interest groups while working with Jeremy Richardson in the 1970s. They completed Governing Under Pressure in 1979 and Government and Pressure Groups in Britain in 1987. He has completed two major ESRC supported surveys into membership issues with William Maloney, which were reported in The Protest Business (1997) and Democracy and Interest Groups (2007). His other relevant works include Engineers and Professional Self Regulation (1992) and Shell, Greenpeace and Brent Spar (2001).