The Influence of Organization on Policy: Theory, Findings, Conclusions

This article analyzes recent research on the impact of non-party organizations on
policy, describing its theoretical coherence, operationalization of key concepts,
views of different types of organizations, hypothesis testing, efforts to generalize
from its findings, and proposals for improving future research. The analysis shows
that few relevant articles in major journals in political science and sociology test
theory; researchers seldom explicitly define key concepts; though researchers regularly
study interest groups and social movement organizations, much of their work
focuses on other types of organizations; researchers regularly make no predictions
about organizations’ impact on policy, and when they do, a majority of their predictions
are wrong. Researchers rarely generalize; they seldom claim that their conclusions
have implications for theory; and their suggestions for future work are mostly
generic. The analysis points to weaknesses in current research and proposes ways to
overcome them.

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00048-x