Close Cousins or False Friends? Studying Interest Groups and INGOs
Abstract
Scholarship on interest groups and political advocacy is a sub-field with a degree of coherence around core questions and methods, yet is embracing of contributions from and engagement with other sub-fields (and even disciplines). Within political science, groups are often a component of a broader research agenda. Public policy scholars find groups important as one of a raft of actors who seek to agenda set, develop, and implement policy (both to maintain the status quo and to seek change). More broadly, scholars of political participation, political parties, or of democratic systems, see groups in the context of notions of ‘political linkage’ or as ‘transmission belts’ between citizens and their representatives. Here, the emphasis is on the functional connections between civil society and political institutions such organisations can facilitate. Of note here is the increasing engagement of party and interest group scholars around a theme of ‘political organisations’.