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413 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1974)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0413 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Interest groups have become remarkably salient during the past decade, and particularly in a political context.1 In part, this risorgimento reflects the emergence of so-called protest and consumer groups whose ideological fervor and provocative tactics, however disconcerting to governmental elites, have captured the attention of the mass media in most societies. The consequences include a clearer picture of the symbiotic role which interest groups often play in shaping public policy. Various publics have been given a look behind the official apparatus and have come away with a new appreciation of political power and the extent to which policy in major institutional sectors is conditioned by the claims and expectations of articulate private groups. The extent to which the legitimacy and authority of governmental elites can be challenged by political amateurs, often with limited resources, is surely one of the critical experiences of these unsettled times. This has disenchanted many scholars and, perhaps, especially political scientists who have often assumed that the decisive role in policy innovation and formulation lay in the hands of those who command the formal political structure. Meanwhile, the rhetoric and the reality of participation and community control have brought new attention to the larger social role of interest groups from the standpoint of those who have sponsored group action in the political arena, as well as from those who have been mainly concerned with analyzing group behavior. Those in the latter camp have come to see more clearly, with Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, the functional need for private groups as a mechanism for holding society together, for explaining Durkheim's primal question: How is society possible? Some instrument is required to propel individuals into the social mainstream: Collective activity is always too complex to be able to be expressed through the single and unique organ of the state. Moreover, the state is too remote from individuals, its relations with them too external and intermittent to penetrate deeply within individual consciences and socialize them. When the state is the only environment in which men can live communal lives, they inevitably lose contact, become detached, and society disintegrates. A nation can only be maintained if, between the state and the individual, there is intercalated a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract 1. Some definition of the term interest group may be useful. Sometimes it is used interchangeably with pressure group. At other times, the latter term is applied to interest groups only in their political role. Some observers distinguish the two, with pressure groups regarded invidiously, while interest groups are believed to be fully legitimate. It seems, however, that most interest groups act at one time or another as pressure groups, when they are confronted by governmental actions which are sufficiently critical. To some extent, pressure group is used to characterize groups with whose objectives one disagrees. One man's Picasso is another's pressure. Given the broad compass of the following articles, a rather abstract definition seems desirable, such as: interest groups are collectivities organized around an explicit, aggregate value 'on behalf of which political claims are made vis-a-vis government, other groups and the public. One is tempted to add some aspect of continuity to this definition, but empirically it is clear that group life is often Darwinian, especially among poverty and consumer groups whose lack of hard political resources often makes their lives precarious and short. ix

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