Interest Groups and Communist Politics Revisited

Abstract

More than fifteen years have passed since the outline of an interest group approach to communist politics appeared in World Politics, and more than a decade has elapsed since the publication of a volume devoted to a fuller elaboration of this theme in its Soviet context (Skilling, 1966b; Skilling and Griffiths, 1971). Since then, according to Jerry Hough’s generous judgement, ‘Soviet studies have been dominated by the discussion of interest groups and pluralism’, and most major research in this field has ‘focused in one way or another on the input side of the Soviet political system’ (Hough, 1983, p. 37). David Garson, by contrast, wrote of ‘a flutter of group analyses of Soviet politics’ and predicted that the interest would soon wane as it had with respect to interest groups in political science generally (Garson, 1978, p. 153).