Advocacy

Actors

The increase in the number of advocacy groups is one of the most striking and still ongoing trends in Western societies. The number of citizens willing to join an interest group has increased over many decades. In the United States, which has been in the vanguard, this so-called advocacy explosion started around 1960. Whereas between 1920 and 1960 the number of interest groups represented in Washington merely doubled, it quadrupled within the following 20 years. Similarly, at the end of the 1980s, the number of interest groups represented at the European Union (EU) in Brussels was 10 times higher than it was at the beginning of the 1970s, and it quadrupled between 1985 and 1991. The rapid growth in number was accompanied by a structural change with respect to the scope, intensity, and shape of advocacy. Today, advocacy is more diverse and much more professional than it was a few decades ago, including an increase in staff acting as in-house lobbyists, a growth of different kinds of lobbying firms performing surrogate representation, and the development of more and more forms of direct and indirect lobbying.

In the first half of the 20th century, the universe of advocacy groups in the Western world was dominated by trade, professional, and labor organizations. For example, before 1950 in the United States, these three types of groups accounted for over three quarters of all organized interests active in politics. Beginning in the 1960s, however, we can find a significant decline in the rate of unionization, first of all in the United States, and, since the 1980s, also in most Western European countries. Although the number of the other types of established groups continued to increase even in the second half of the century, their share of the group universe declined due to an even more rapid growth of various types of organizations from the [Page 29]nonprofit sector concerned with health, social welfare, culture, education, public affairs, consumers, senior citizens, taxpayers, civil rights, women's rights, human rights, the environment, religion, and other areas. Many of these groups originated in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which mobilized their constituencies to turn the public's attention to new interests and new political problems. Parts of these movements turned into associations that would allow the groups to maintain their capacity to advocate even in times of declining mobilization.

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