How Do Political Interest Groups Influence Politics

American politics is built upon collective action. One of the core arguments made by Jane Mansbridge (2014) is that political action requires large scale, group-level collective action. In recent history, the lines that separated how an individual influenced politics and how organized groups influence politics have become blurred. This makes the question of representation not simply one of individual level representation, but a much more complex scenario involving individuals, a rapidly increasing collection of politically active groups, and representatives being pushed to extreme positions through a variety of electoral means. This paper will first survey several findings that illustrate the overall context under which political interest groups operate in the political realm. Next, contextual factors that exacerbate the normative problems …show more content…
The first is through the distribution of interest groups. In the 2001 Washington Representativeness Study, the overwhelming majority of organizations listed in the directory are institutions representing corporations, universities or hospitals. In addition, within membership groups, those in the highest SES quintile are more likely to be involved in the day-to-day functioning of the political associations they are apart of. Finally, the expressed interests of these groups have been found to be quite different than the expressed views of average citizens, with the interests of business groups showing a slight negative correlation with those of the average citizen (Gilens & Page, 2014). The disproportionate level of influence that groups representing business groups and institutions has led Scholzman et al. (2012) to proclaim “the heavenly chorus does sing with an upper-class accent and that the voices of advocates of broad publics and the less privileged are much more muted,” (p.