Two New Protest Groups: The Peace and Women’s Movements

Abstract

The standard approach to the study of political groups has concentrated on political parties and interest or pressure groups. This has led to an underestimation of less conventional kinds of political activity. Thus political scientists for a long time failed to notice that Britons were becoming less enchanted with most of the political parties, and that many people had either lapsed into resigned indifference to politics or were channelling their energies into new kinds of organisation. People look to interest groups, not just parties, to realise their demands, and interest groups have altered in ways that render the conventional classification schemes inadequate.