XLIII ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops

University of Warsaw (Poland)

29th March – 2nd April 2015

Workshop: Conceptualising and Comparing Interest Groups and Interest Group Systems

Chairs: Claudius Wagemann and Andrea Pritoni

Conceptualising Interest Groups: An Addition to the 1980s

Andrea Pritoni1 and Claudius Wagemann2

ABSTRACT: The so-called OBI project (‘Organization of Business Interests’), which Schmitter and Streeck

carried out in the early 1980s, provided subsequent scholars with a framework for the analysis of interest

groups. One major contribution in this respect was the development of two different sets of opposite

associational logics: on the one hand, interest groups can emphasize the ‘logic of influence’ or the ‘logic of

membership’; on the other hand, interest groups are also challenged by finding a position between the ‘logic of

effective implementation’ and the ‘logic of goal formation’. This paper takes up this framework systematically

and conceptualizes and operationalizes the ideal types which are derived from these logics. It is discussed with

the help of set theory, in particular fuzzy sets, in how far the oppositional character of these logics can and

must be overcome.

KEYWORDS: Interest Groups – Quali-quantitative Methods – Conceptual Analysis – Set Theory

1 Andrea Pritoni is post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University

of Bologna. His research interests are mainly oriented towards the fields of comparative politics (in particular with respect to parliamentary governments), interest groups, and policy analysis (with a particular focus on the banking and insurance sector). He has just published a book on the Italian Association of Banks and several articles on Italian interest groups.

2 Claudius Wagemann is full professor of social science methodology in the Department of Political Science at the Goethe University Frankfurt. With regard to interest group research, he published a book with Routledge on Private Interest Governments and several articles and book contributions. He has also widely published on qualitative comparative methods, most notably QCA and fuzzy sets. Furthermore, his research agenda includes right-wing extremism from a social movement perspective, political parties, and the Quality of Democracy.

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1 Introduction

Sometimes, social science research areas are shaped by contributions which divide the

discussion in ‘before’ and ‘after’. With regard to interest group research, this is the case with

Schmitter’s (1974) seminal article on neo-corporatism. This article has mainly become

known as a caesura with regard to reasoning about interest groups. Above all, it added

another view to the dominant pluralist perspective (most famously, Truman 1951), namely

neo-corporatism, and thus placed a new emphasis on the insight that interest groups very

often play a crucial role in the policy-making process. Neo-corporatism quickly diffused into

the research community (Czada 1994), and its empirical manifestation in real-world policy-

making was confirmed, despite periodical ups and downs (Schmitter 1989; Schmitter &

Grote 1997). Additionally, this theoretical advancement was followed by an intense empirical

research activity which culminated in the late 1970s / early 1980s in the so-called OBI

(‘Organization of Business Interests’) project. The initial reflections on the design of this

major project (Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981]) did not only become of practical use for the

numerous (mainly junior) researchers involved in OBI, but have also led to many more

fundamental insights about interest groups3 which have survived the actual empirical project.

Next to the development of guidelines for organizational analysis which differentiate the

organizational properties of interest domains, structures, resources, and policy outputs

(Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981]: 45ff.), two sets of associational logics, namely the ‘logic of

influence’ and the ‘logic of membership’, and the ‘logic of goal formation’ and the ‘logic of

effective implementation’ have become famous. The latter have then also been integrated

with the notion of various organizational properties and types of goods and finally being

enlarged to a typology of four ideal types (see below and Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981]:

21) have become famous.

What followed was that an impressive amount of empirical research on interest groups

has been produced (Hojnacki et al. 2012; Baumgartner & Bunea 2014). However, conceptual

analysis has not been at the core of the activities; indeed, conceptual, methodological and

disciplinary barriers seem to have rendered the accumulation of knowledge in interest group

research quite difficult (Beyers et al. 2008: 1103)4. Nevertheless, scholars still continue to

devote little attention to the analysis of the fundamental concepts on which IG scholarship

is based. This, of course, also has notable (negative) effects on organizational analysis. The

understanding of organizations oftentimes seems limited to the questions of organizational

resources which interest groups are able to spend in order to have a role in the policy-

making process (Crombez 2002; Eising 2007), as well as to those of internal democracy

3 While Schmitter and Streeck (1999 [1981]) had designed their original ideas for business interest

associations, some of their input is so generic that we refer to interest groups in general in this text, instead of to only the business sector as the original idea was.

4 Not even the same definition of interest group is taken for granted in the literature (Baroni et al. 2014). A key distinction can be made between a ‘behavioural definition’ (Salisbury 1984; Baumgartner et al. 2009) and an ‘organisational definition’ (Jordan & Greenan 2012; Binderkrantz et al. 2014). In the first case, groups are defined based on their observable, policy-related activities; in the second case, the ‘interest group’ term is reserved only for membership associations.

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(Halpin 2006; Binderkrantz 2009), whereas (almost) nothing has been said with respect to

their intra-organizational structures to which the famous four logics allude.

This paper departs from the general shortcoming of conceptual analysis in interest

group research and focuses on the four logics as famous representatives of path-breaking

work from more than 30 years ago. More precisely, it will present an attempt to

conceptualize and operationalize the two dichotomies (logic of influence vs. logic of

membership and logic of goal formation vs. logic of effective implementation) via indicators

for the four ideal types (government, firm, club, movement) which can be derived from their

interrelation. This will open the question whether there is really a conceptual opposition

between pairs of ideal types which seems to be a consequence from earlier

conceptualization. This will also make it possible to link the abovementioned great amount

of recent empirical contributions to the interest group literature with a more sophisticated

conceptual analysis. With regard to this, we propose twelve (three for each ideal type)

possible indicators accounting for how much an interest group is government-like, firm-like,

club-like or movement-like; during the course of our argumentation, we recur to fuzzy set

theory in order to ascertain whether or not – on the base of these indicators – real-world

interest groups follow the oppositional basis which is implicit in the associative logics.

We proceed as follows: in an opening section (par. 2), we introduce Schmitter’s and

Streeck’s (1999 [1981]) path-breaking contribution. Then (par. 3), we recur to the concept of

‘property space’ developed by Lazarsfeld (1937) in order to question the orthogonality of

the four logics. In the next section (par. 4), we propose potential indicators for all the four

ideal types developed by Schmitter and Streeck. This is followed (par. 5) by an overview on

how and why pairs of logics (as well as pairs of ideal types) are not ‘true’ opposites to one

another, making use of operations known from fuzzy set theory. Finally (par. 6), we make

some concluding remarks and suggestions for future research.

2 Schmitter’s and Streeck’s Four Logics: Looking Back to the 1980s

As mentioned, the project design for the OBI project (Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981]) had

an enormous conceptual impact on the subsequent study of interest groups. Not only did

the paper provide hands-on advice on different dimensions of organizational analysis

(interest domains, structures, policy outputs, and resources), but has mainly become famous

through the introduction of a terminology which was represented as a typology of structural

components of interest groups. At the heart of this brilliant use of typology, a graph was

developed (figure 1).

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Figure 1: Schmitter’s and Streeck’s (1999 [1981]: 21) scheme on interest group logics

As can be seen, this graph mainly develops around two axes which depict

organizational logics: organizations can follow a ‘logic of influence’, recognizing the

characteristics of their state interlocutors, or a ‘logic of membership’, oriented towards the

characteristics of the organizational members. Furthermore, the graph visualizes the

difference between the ‘logic of goal formation’ and the ‘logic of effective implementation’.

This distinction goes back to Child et al.’s (1973) earlier work on trade unions in which these

two logics were named ‘representative rationality’ and ‘administrative rationality’, respectively

(Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981]: 19). Admittedly, although this is rather an anecdotal

observation than the result of careful empirical analysis, the former pair of logics has

received greater scholarly attention than the latter.

In any case, these two pairs of logics complement each other: while the logic of

influence and the logic of membership indicate the nature of the dominant exchange

relationship, the logic of goal formation and the logic of effective implementation focus on

the internal organization. As a consequence, the four logically possible combinations of the

two axes result in different structural ideal types to which associations can become similar or,

ideally, equal. Schmitter and Streeck (1999 [1981]: 21) identify the ideal type of a firm which

provides services through selective goods (logic of membership and logic of effective

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implementation); of a government which sells compliance by means of monopoly goods

and keeps control over its members (logic of influence and logic of effective

implementation); of a movement which exerts pressure for public goods, representing its

members (logic of influence and logic of goal formation); and of a club which creates

consensus around solidaristic goods and has mainly participatory properties (logic of

membership and logic of goal formation). This typology clearly went beyond the purely

illustrative purpose of many 2x2 tables, using real-world labels for the ideal types. At the

same time, it took the notion of ideal types seriously, since, when getting too close to the

ideal type, an association runs the risk to change into something different (namely, a

government, a movement, a club, or a firm). Moreover, this set of logics proved its analytical

power by developing further into spin-off discussions, such as the literature on selective

goods (Olson 1971 [1965]; Moe 1980), which has influenced interest group research from a

conceptual point of view, or the research area on ‘Private Interest Governments’ (Streeck &

Schmitter 1985), which became substantially path-breaking.

In any case, Schmitter and Streeck (1999 [1981]: 21) had produced a masterpiece

which clearly organized the interest group world along two dimensions which were both

dichotomous and which led to metaphorical descriptions of interest groups through real-

world organizational forms which were formulated as ideal types.

A basic underlying principle of the graph seems to be an ‘either…or’ perspective on

the two dichotomous logics, although the two authors were not explicit on this. An interest

group could either be oriented more towards the logic of membership or to the logic of

influence; and either more to the logic of effective implementation or to the logic of goal

formation. A gain towards one side had to be compensated through a loss at the other side.

In short, Schmitter and Streeck produced a very useful framework for analysis which

was well received in the scholarly discussion, and which was implicitly strongly marked

through the dichotomous (and oppositional) understanding of the underlying logics shaping

associational structures. In the following, we will challenge some elements of the picture,

looking at it from new perspectives on conceptual analysis.

3 Schmitter’s and Streeck’s Typology as a ‘Property Space’

In a certain sense, the picture proposed by Schmitter and Streeck (1999 [1981]: 21) reflects

what Lazarsfeld (1937) has called a ‘property space’.5 The central idea of this is that every

case can be univocally located in a property space with regard to its specific manifestation of

the constituting dimensions. In other words, an association underlining very much the logic

of influence (and thus disregarding the logic of membership), while being indifferent with

regard to the vertical axis of the logics, would have to be placed somewhere at mid-height in

the right part of the graph.

5 Note that Lazarsfeld presented his ideas with the example of three dimensions; therefore, he uses the

metaphor of a ‘space’. Schmitter’s and Streeck’s two-dimensional graph would imply a ‘property plain’.

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Property spaces à la Lazarsfeld have recently been re-discovered in yet another

literature, namely in the methodological innovation of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

(Ragin 1987; 2000; 2008; Schneider & Wagemann 2012). During a preparatory phase for the

execution of the algorithm, this technique foresees so-called fuzzy values to be attributed to

cases. Fuzzy values indicate in how far a given case is a member of a set; e.g., a membership

value of 0.4 for an association to be a member in the set of successful associations indicates

that the association is rather out of than in the set of successful associations, but that it is

close to the cross-over point which differentiates between successful and other associations.6

This step of assigning fuzzy values to cases (i.e., of assessing set membership scores) is also

called ‘calibration’ (Ragin 2008: 71ff.; Schneider & Wagemann 2012: 32ff.).

Fuzzy scales are characterized by combining ‘differences in kind’ and ‘differences in

degree’ (Schneider & Wagemann 2012: 14). While the widely used dichotomies also capture

differences in kind, they fail in establishing differences in degree;7 in contrast, ordinal or

continuous scales as they are known from statistical analysis do indicate differences in

degree, but often fail with regard to differences in kind, because the concepts they describe

are not dichotomous in nature (or the dichotomy is not made explicit).

So, it does not come as a surprise that scholars working on modes of concept

formation in the social sciences became aware of the notion of fuzzy sets and implemented

this idea into concept building strategies (Goertz 2005). Most concepts used in the social

sciences are implicitly ‘fuzzy’, and making use of various properties of set theory could

eventually lead to better and more sophisticated concepts.

Without any doubt, Schmitter’s and Streeck’s pairwise logics can be considered fuzzy

scales: they establish differences in kind, expressed in dichotomies which contradict one

another, and they differentiate between various intensities of the manifestation of the logic.

Also, the notion of ideal types which is derived corresponds to the ideal typical thinking of

set theory and QCA where, at a certain point of the analytical process, cases are located in

property spaces, depending on their ‘distance’ to the ideal types the dichotomy represents

(Schneider & Wagemann 2012: 103). Schmitter’s and Streeck’s idea is even more

sophisticated than what usually happens with set theory, namely they creatively combine two

fuzzy scales and derive four ideal types from these scales. If, however, the two dimensions

leading to the four ideal types represent fuzzy scales, then the four ideal types are also in

complementary relations: the ideal type of an ‘interest group as a government’ is the logical

and empirical opposite to the ideal type of an ‘interest group as a club’; similarly, the ideal

types of movements and firms become true opposites to one another. In other words, there

are more oppositions (and thus fuzzy scales) in the graph (Figure 1) than just two pairwise

logics. Pairs of ideal types also represent fuzzy scales, with the ideal types being the

endpoints of the scales.

6 More precisely, fuzzy values (between 0 and 1) indicate the membership of cases in sets. If a case is a full

member of a set (i.e., if the set characteristics describe the case sufficiently perfectly), then the value of 1 is attributed; if the case is a full non-member (i.e., the case does not reflect the set characteristics at all), then the value of 0 is given, with all the various gradations between 0 and 1.

7 If no differences in degree are established, the QCA literature calls the sets crisp sets (Schneider & Wagemann 2012: 24ff.).

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4 Flesh to the Bones: Indicators for Ideal Types

As we claimed in the introduction, while Schmitter’s and Streeck’s conceptual framework

influenced to a large extent interest group scholarship to date, it is nevertheless weakened by

some important lacunae: one of the main shortcomings is that there have never been

systematic operationalizations of the two pairs of logics as well as of the two pairs of ideal

types stemming from their interrelation. By focusing on ideal types rather than on logics, it

becomes easier to place real-world associations somewhere in the picture, not least since the

ideal types explicitly serve at connecting conceptual thinking with real-world objects. While

finding indicators for the four logics can be regarded as a difficult, if not impossible, task to

do, things become easier when we try to find indicators for the four ideal types, since they

stand for organizational forms which we know quite well. Let us imagine the following list

of indicators would be developed for deciding to which ideal types an association belongs:

Table 1: Potential indicators for associational ideal types

Ideal Type Specialized Activity Empirical Indicators

Firm Providing services Legal and/or fiscal advice for associates

Financing supply to associates

Training courses for members

Government Selling compliance No. of granted licenses and/or certifications to associates

No. of negative sanctions inflicted on associates

Solution to litigation among associates

Movement Exerting pressure No. of public hearings

No. of press releases

No. of strikes

Club Creating consensus No. of organized seminars and/or conferences

No. of Assembly meetings

Newsletter for associates

As becomes evident from Figure 1, Schmitter and Streeck claimed that: i) firm-like

interest groups provide services through selective goods; ii) government-like interest groups

sell compliance by means of monopoly goods; iii) movement-like interest groups exert

pressure for public goods; and iv) club-like interest groups create consensus around

solidaristic goals. Therefore, we have used these types of goods in order to derive indicators

for organizational types.

Selective goods are private goods that an interest group produces exclusively for its

members, in order to differentiate and eventually protect compliant members so that they

are withheld from non-members or members violating their formal obligations towards the

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interest group (Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981], 88ff.). The important point about this kind

of goods is that they are individually usable by members; in addition, they can be considered

as ‘positive sanctions’ (rewards, incentives) for joining an association as well as ‘negative

sanctions’ to the extent that they can be withdrawn from non-compliant members. We

decided to differentiate these goods into three categories: legal/fiscal services; economic

services; ‘educational’ services. As a consequence, the indicators we selected in order to

account for how much a real-world interest group is similar to a firm, are the following:

providing legal and/or fiscal advice for members; financing supply to members; developing

training courses for members.

As far as selling compliance is concerned, we can claim that all interest groups

negotiating with policy makers or other interest groups on behalf of their members have a

crucial interest in being able to act as an unitary actor (Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981],

90ff.). Whether or not (as well as how much) they are able to do so depends on their

capability of inflicting negative sanctions8 and/or of rewarding their associates with positive

sanctions.9 Therefore, we chose the following three indicators in order to account for how

much a given interest group approaches the government-like ideal type: the number of

licenses and/or certifications it grants to members; the number of negative sanctions it

inflicts to them; whether or not it is able to give solution to litigations among members.

Maybe the first and foremost activity of any interest group is to exert pressure on

policy makers in order to get representation and to obtain favorable policy decisions. To this

respect, interest groups which want being influential in the policy process specialize in

lobbying activities. In the literature, a crucial distinction is made between direct lobbying, i.e.

direct relationships with politicians and bureaucrats, and indirect lobbying, namely appealing

to media or mobilizing its own membership (Grant 1989; Maloney et al. 1994). Therefore,

we chose the number of public hearings as an indicator for direct lobbying, whereas the

number of press releases as well as the number of strikes are indicators for indirect lobbying.

Solidaristic goods are generally considered as to be connected to sociability,

participation in collective activities, prestige, ‘connections’, formation of a collective identity

and the like (Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981], 86ff.). The important points about this kind

of goods are that they are collective goods – namely they involve the interest group in its

entirety – as well as they stand for building up, reinforcing, and sustaining the identification

of the members with their association. To this respect, we thus decided to select the number

of organized seminars and/or conferences, the number of Assembly meetings (and, more in

general, how many times organizational bodies are called to round up) and whether or not

interest groups provide newsletters to members, as indicators of how much a real-world

association is similar to a club.

5 From Fuzzy Sets to Profiles of Interest Groups

8 Negative sanctions are generally punishments inflicted by an interest group, or by the State on behalf of an

interest group, upon non-compliant members. 9 Positive sanctions are usually rewards the interest group gives to its members for compliance with its

decisions.

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It is easy to imagine that these indicators – as well as any enlarged version of our brief list –

could enable researchers to assign fuzzy values to single associations, with regard to their

being similar to a club, a government, a movement, or a firm. In the end, every association

would be characterized by four fuzzy values which describe its belongingness to the four

ideal types. However, while this strategy sounds straightforward and could ultimately lead to

a precise positioning of individual IGs somewhere in the graph, two observations disturb

the picture: first, the conceptual opposition of firms and movements, and between

governments and clubs, respectively, is terminologically not so clear as the one between the

logics of influence and membership. More precisely, the question emerges to which shared

dimension the pairs of ideal types belong: what are the features with regard to which firms

and movements, or governments and clubs, respectively, are so different to one another?

The second observation, however, is even more important and disturbing and can also

be seen as the underlying reason for the first observation of terminological confusion.

Empirically, it can happen (perhaps we can even dare to say that it is even probable) that

interest groups behave both as firms do and as the (seemingly) opposed movements do.

There is no reason why one and the same association cannot be active in legal advice and

engage in unconventional forms of participation, such as strikes. In other words, while being

attributed high fuzzy values for being a firm, there is no logical reason why an association

cannot also be attributed high fuzzy values for being a movement.

As we see, the nature of real-world complex associations can allow for behaving as a

government as well as a club, or as a firm as well as a movement. At this point, a

mathematical discussion of this observation is on order: fuzzy sets follow the rules of ‘fuzzy

negation’ (Schneider & Wagemann 2012: 47). The membership value of a case in the

complement (i.e., the negation) of a set is always calculated by subtracting the membership

value in the original set from 1:

~A = 1 – A

If a case has a fuzzy membership value of 0.8 in a given set, then it will automatically

have a fuzzy membership value of 0.2 in the complement of the set. This rule also means

that the fuzzy values of a case in a set and in the complementary set will sum up to 1.

However, as introduced before, with the indicators we have chosen, it is not excluded that

fuzzy membership values of two seemingly opposite ideal types will be both above 0.5 (i.e.,

that the association is similar to both ideal types of opposed ends), and thus the sum of the

values is also above 1. In a similar logic, the sum could also be below 1, if both membership

values of the opposed ideal types are below 0.5, or if the weak manifestation of one type is

not compensated through an equally strong manifestation of the other type. In fact, it is an

illusion to think that, when working with real-world indicators, the sum of the resulting

indicators would be exactly 1.

What does this mean? First, this leaves us with the insight that real-world indicators do

not behave as neatly as theoretically derived concepts. However, this is only one part of the

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story, since the deviances from the sum of 1 can be empirically also other than just marginal

or meaningless.

What is more is the insight that the ideal types are no true opposites to one another.

To be sure, Schmitter and Streeck do not claim this anywhere in their text. However, this

insight nevertheless has important consequences for Schmitter’s and Streeck’s graph: if the

ideal types are not true opposites to one another (i.e., do not belong to the same fuzzy scale),

then the logics are not true opposites to one another, either. If the logics were true

opposites, then the combination of their extremes would again have to produce true

opposites. Since the latter is not the case, the former cannot be said, either. But perhaps such

a clear-cut statement was not even on Schmitter’s and Streeck’s agenda, although their

reference to the ‘Janus-like nature of […] associations in their role as intermediaries between

at least two independently constituted, resourceful and strategically active sets of actors’

(Schmitter & Streeck 1999 [1981]: 19) suggests something of the kind. However, when

Schmitter and Streeck established the labels of the logics, they did not even choose a

terminology which reflects the oppositional character of the logics. An opposition between

‘influence’ and ‘membership’ or between ‘goal formation’ and ‘effective implementation’ is

no semantic necessity. Also, from a fuzzy set perspective, the fuzzy negation of the presence

of a strong logic of influence would be the absence of a strong logic of influence, which is

not necessarily conceptually equal to the presence of a strong logic of membership.

Thus, as a preliminary conclusion we can hold that the opposite logics are used in the

literature in complementary ways, but that not even Schmitter’s and Streeck’s wording

confirms this exclusive use of them as complementary categories. Being equipped with this

insight, we can make use of the not-any-more orthogonal structure of the graph, adding

some more insights from fuzzy set theory.

This concerns, first of all, how to use these insights for statements about connecting

the four logics with the four ideal types, on the basis of established fuzzy values for

membership in the four ideal types. It is clear that assessing the presence or absence of, e.g.,

the logic of membership must be a function of the fuzzy values of the interest group under

analysis with regard to governments and with regard to movements (since these are the

corresponding ideal types to the logic of membership). But how shall the two fuzzy values

be aggregated? One possibility would be the arithmetic mean which has become kind of the

default option in index building. However, this would mean that, if an interest group is

similar to a movement, but not to a government, the weak performance as a government

reduces the strength of the logic of membership. However, such a conclusion does not

make sense. The strength of the logic of membership in that case is due to the interest

group being so similar to a movement. In other words, one of the two types is sufficient to be

there in order to indicate the presence of a given logic. This idea of sufficiency is not only

one of the cornerstones of set-theoretic social science analysis (Schneider & Wagemann

2012: 57), but is also being used in set-theoretic reasoning about concepts (Goertz 2005:

35ff.).10 In set theory, these sufficiency relations between single sets are illustrated as ‘unions

10 In order to understand better the concept of ‘sufficiency‘ in concept formation, the term of ‘functional

equivalence’ (Goertz 2005: 15) can be helpful. In our case, the two ideal types are functionally equivalent

11

of sets’ and are verbally connected through the logical OR (Schneider & Wagemann 2012:

45). The logical OR then leads to the so-called ‘maximum rule’ which means that the

membership of a case in a union of sets is the maximum of the individual memberships of

the case in the constituting sets (Schneider & Wagemann 2012: 46).

Applying this principle, the fuzzy membership values of associations in the ideal types

can be used to derive – via the maximum of the corresponding ideal types – fuzzy

membership values for the four logics, without having to recur to indicators for the logics. In

the end, every association is characterized by four fuzzy values, one for each logic. We can

now take Schmitter’s and Streeck’s original typology and develop ‘profiles’ of single interest

groups, by simply graphically connecting the various points which are identified through

their fuzzy set memberships on the four logics. This will lead to four-corners geographical

figures (which are only truly rectangular in very special settings).

Figure 2: Examples of interest group profiles (1)

These profiles – similar to spider (or radar) charts in quantitative analysis – can

graphically describe the composition of associational logics. This is especially important,

since the above has shown us that an association cannot only correspond to two logics

(which would be the case if the pairs described opposites), but to up to all four (since the

pairs do not describe opposites). At the same time, this mode of representing profiles also

works for those associations which concentrate on just one logic.11

There is yet another useful effect: it might happen that two (or more) given

associations are characterized by profiles (derived in the described way) which are different

with regard to the associational logic which they share. Another useful term to describe the idea is ‘substitutability’: with regard to the shared logic, both corresponding ideal types can substitute one another.

11 Of course, the profile can also capture those associations which do not concentrate on any of the logics. However, this only happens if the associations do not correspond to any of the ideal types. It is hard to imagine how such an interest group should empirically look like.

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in size, but are, at the same time parallel (i.e., all four lines making up the profile are parallel

to one another, and the profiles are stretches of one another), as in Figure 3:

Figure 3: Examples of interest group profiles (2)

In this case, interest groups have the same profile in kind, but are different with regard

to their intensity in showing the profile. Similarities of associations have different intensities.

In other words, these profiles as a final result of our considerations clearly mirror the

underlying principle of fuzzy sets, namely the combination of differences in kind and in

degree. Actually, they become a kind of ‘fuzzy profiles’.

6 Concluding Remarks and Future Research

Our paper departs from the observation of the notable and path-breaking contribution

which the neo-corporatist agenda of the 1970s and 1980s had on interest group research,

both from a conceptual and a substantial point of view. First and foremost, we pointed to

the project design of Schmitter and Streeck (1999 [1981]). More precisely, we referred to

their development of two different sets of (supposed) opposite associational logics, namely

the ‘logic of influence’ vs. the ‘logic of membership’, and the ‘logic of effective

implementation’ vs. the ‘logic of goal formation’. We took up Schmitter’s and Streeck’s idea

to combine these logics into ideal types which received the labels of other types of

corporate actors, namely governments, firms, movements, and clubs.

In a subsequent step, we showed with the help of indicators for each of the four ideal

types that they are no true opposites to one another. Consequently, the pairs of logics are no

true opposites to one another, either. Taking advantage of this, we proposed a ‘maximum

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approach’ for the description of associational logics and developed profiles which

characterize individual associations. These profiles can show on which logics associations

place emphasis; the logic of fuzzy values – which also capture differences in degrees – also

offers the possibility to show which associations are similar in kind to which logics, while

representing them at different degrees.

Notwithstanding, this study represents a very preliminary analysis, and further research

on a number of issues is required. First of all, a further refinement of the indicators for the

four quadrants is required: our proposal is only a first step towards a goal which is both

necessary as well as very demanding. Second, and only after a good deal of consensus will have

formed around concepts and indicators, it will be both necessary and very useful to proceed

with the empirical analysis of interest groups, mainly in comparative perspective. In

conclusion, still much has to be done in order to fully conceptualize interest groups and their

underlying associational logics. This paper has not yet discussed whether other (implicitly)

dichotomous pairs of logics would have to complement the existing proposal. We are only

opening a discussion, adding some insights from novel methodological approaches; in other

words, this paper is mainly an hommage to a path-breaking and nearly unique typological

scheme which – in its basics – has survived for more than 30 years by now.

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