Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions?

TL;DR: For instance, this paper pointed out that the lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences has a negative effect on the ability to distinguish between interest groups and other policy relevant bodies, such as corporations or institutions.

Abstract: This article notes the systemic lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences and attempts to illustrate the adverse consequences by closer examination of the particular example of the interest group field. It indicates the significant ambiguities implicit in the term. Not all policy-influencing organisations are interest groups as normally understood, but because there is a lack of an appropriate label the term interest group is used by default. The article seeks to distinguish between interest groups and other policy relevant bodies—often corporations or institutions. It finds disadvantages in adopting a functional interpretation of the interest group term (i.e. any organisation trying to influence public policy). While the wider range of organisations are crucial in understanding the making of public policy, it is confusing to assume that this wider population are all interest groups. The article instead advances the complementary notions of pressure participant, policy participant and interest group. This slightly expanded repertoire of terms avoids conflating important distinctions, and, in Sartori’s term permits ‘disambiguation’. The core assumption is that the search for comparative data and exploration of normative questions implies some harmonisation in the interest group currency. With few—if any—exceptions, concepts in the social sciences are poorly defined: indeed most prove popular precisely because they have an imprecision that allows promiscuous application. 1 Though the press and non-specialist political scientists think they know when an organisation is, or is not, an interest group, this is an area where more careful scrutiny produces less rather than more confidence. This article ‘tests’ a very basic ‘unit of analysis’ crucial to political science, the interest group, and finds that the elasticity of understanding among scholars in the area makes cumulative studies (unnecessarily) difficult. In the absence of definitional clarity, general conclusions about what sorts of groups dominate the democratic system—an important dimension to interest group study—are almost impossible to draw with any accuracy. The core proposition in this article 2 is that different authors cover different types of organisation in the field loosely delineated by the interest/pressure group label. While there is value in Karl Popper’s concern that we should not be ‘goaded into taking seriously words and their meanings’ (Popper 1976, quoted in Gerring 1999, 360), if there are no agreed language-tools there can be no comparison of conclusions.