ABSTRACT
The primary reason why political scientists (and you) study interest groups is that interest groups lobby. Organizations that do not lobby—organizations such as business firms or charities that are not politically active, and fan clubs and social clubs—are not of much interest to scholars of politics. However, lobbying is not all that interest groups do. In fact, many (if not most) interest groups— or to be more precise, the people who work for them—spend far more time on non-lobbying activities than they do on lobbying. Most of the people who run and work for business firms, for example, spend far more time on the non-lobbying activities associated with designing, manufacturing, and selling things to consumers than they do on lobbying. Even lobbyists—the people who actually do a group’s lobbying—spend a great deal of their time on non-lobbying activities. In short, a thorough understanding of interest group behavior requires a thorough understanding of the non-lobbying activities of interest groups.
