Organizational Populations: Professionalization, Maintenance and Democratic Delivery

Interest groups do not have complete directorial control of their own destiny — even mature and savvy professionalized organized interests face significant challenges. Intra- and inter-group circumstances and other contextual factors (e.g. political opportunity structures, political agenda and patronage opportunities) account for the shape of organizational universes.1 However, as Halpin and Jordan (2009: 247) argue, ‘the manipulative “fngers” of interest-group leaders and managers surely shape the observed population levels’. Group leaders and entrepreneurs can effect survival and maintenance chances (and the organizational universes their groups inhabit) by altering the mix of incentives on offer to supporters and policy-makers, and the decisions they take on: the organizational policy-making focus (e.g. a broad policy area, a limited range of issues or a single issue); issue priorities; strategies and tactics; and organizational structure (e.g. hierarchical or non-hierarchical, to be a member, supporter or memberless2 group, or the degree and depth of democratic institutionalization). Gray and Lowery (1996), Lowery and Gray (2004a: 18–19), Bosso (2005: 150), Young (2010: 159) and Duffy (2012: 4) have all shown how increasing governmental action (via legislation, programmes and agencies) and spending has stimulated the creation of new organizations (Duffy, 2012: 4; Gray and Lowery, 1996).