Interest Groups

Interest Groups

Introduction

In the language of the social sciences is possible to identify two fundamental meanings of the word 'group'. For the first, general, each group is different from the whole human system global social and political system overall. In other words, each aggregate group, voluntary or natural, that is between the individual and the global society, if we are talking mainly in key social, or between the individual and the political organization of central (in the modern world, usually the State), if we are talking mainly in key policy. For this meaning, the group is both the family and the party, and the class is the cultural association, both the religion and the country club, both the union and the local community, both the company and the economic organization is the 'ethnicity.

In this very general notion, also significant for various reasons, among others because it shows that there are three relevant levels of analysis for the social sciences (individuals, groups, intermediate in the broadest sense, global, social or political), joins, and in some respects is opposed to a more specific concept, which refers to the conditions of 'interest group' and 'pressure group': these are, therefore, a species of the genus 'group', and their definition has between the other in order to distinguish between the various aggregates that arise in an intermediate position in the continuum individual-group-global system. It should also be saying, as we shall see, that there are areas of interaction and problem areas of overlap between the general concept and the specific concept of a group.

The issue of defining

The thematic groups and questions about their role in society and politics pose then, as we have just seen, a large number of significant conceptual problems, primary or induced, and refer to scenarios that can also be very diverse. This brings to the fore the issue of definition, to which we have already mentioned in Chap. 1. Here the initial canonical reference to the work of Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of social pressures, published in 1908. For him, share in the revolt against formalism that characterized American thought at the time, the term 'group' refers to a specific portion of a company of men, "but not considered as a physical mass detached from other masses of men, but mass as an asset that does not prevent the men who participate to participate equally in many other group activities" (see Bentley, 1908, tr. it., p. 259). 

In this context, group and group activities are equivalent terms, with only a difference of tone, useful merely for clarity of expression. On the other hand, there is a group without their own interest. Indeed, an interest, as proposed by Bentley, is the equivalent of a group: the group and the interest are not separate. They are the same thing, that a lot of men bound together to or from a certain activity, so that it follows the bottom of identification between group activities and interest (see Buttà, 1983, p. XXIV) and the latter is not limited to ...