ABSTRACT
Political scientist Hugo Heclo first employs the term ‘issue networks’ in The New American System, a book published by the conservative think tank, The American Enterprise Institute, in 1978. The term describes the emergence of groups of loosely associated NGOs, funders, academics, policywatchers and activists working to influence policy in Washington, D.C. during the 1970s. These webs of actors, with ‘issues as their interest, rather than interests defining positions on issues’ (Heclo: 102), represented a new, and for Heclo concerning, mode of political organization. The activities of these ‘issue-people’, he argued, preceded the involvement of government officials, politicians and the general public, and thus they carried with them a threat to democratic legitimacy: ‘We tend to overlook the many whose webs of influence provoke and guide the exercise of power. These webs are what I will call “issue networks”‘ (ibid.). The opaqueness of the issue network became, indeed, substantial to Heclo’s argument. He admonishes, for example, about the difficulties of knowing where a ‘network leaves off and its environment begins’ (ibid.) and who the dominant participants are in groups in constant state of flux.
