Social movements and interest groups compared : How organisational type matters for explaining Swedish organisations’ advocacy strategies

Summary, in English

The divide between interest groups and social movement studies runs deep, but present developments call for a renewed focus on the relevance of these analytical categories. Both of these two forms of collective action relate to organisations that are assumed to follow distinctive logics and strategies for political influence. This article aims to contribute to the debates on the analytical difference between interest groups and social movements by comparing their political strategies and addressing the relevance of the typology for explaining organisations’ use of political strat-egies. The paper draws on a dataset resulting from a large survey among Swedish civil society organisations among which clear cases of interest group organisations and “old” and “new” social movement organisations (SMOs) were identified. The results show that the distinction between interest groups and social movement organisations has some analytical value when it comes to explaining the use of different types of strategies: e.g. direct lobbying and media-based and protest-based strategies. Also, the distinction between old and new SMOs is shown to be relevant because old SMOs seem to be in a way “in between” interest groups and new SMOs suggesting that social movements tend to develop over time and to become more similar to interest groups.