The scale of interest organization in democratic politics

It is widely assumed that effective democracies host large populations of pressure participants defending their interests and advancing their causes. It is also assumed that as societies develop, the associational world 'explodes'. These twin assumptions prompt simple questions. How many organized interests are there in different societies and how quickly are they growing? Do different types grow at different rates? In this volume, these questions are shown to be much more difficult to answer than they at first. However, a useful sense of scale is provided for the debate and many research practice issues are raised. Significant differences appear cross nationally but some broad trends such as a decline in the number of business groups emerge. Population ecology is used to show that the idea of constant growth was naIve. Contributions from distinguished authors include reports on data from the USA, UK, Denmark and Germany, at different levels of political decision making, from 'below the radar' in local communities to global negations at the World Trade Organization. The volume highlights the need for political science to pay more attention to complex interactions involving a 'cast of thousands' of politically relevant groups.