Interest groups in the USA - The National Rifle Association

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, Martin Luther University, language: English, abstract: Interest- or Lobby groups are coalitions of people, who have the same basic attitude in one or more issues. Grounded on these preferences they try to make demands on other groups of the society to install, to enforce or to preserve their own interests.1 Their main objective is to get access to one or more key positions within the governmental system.2 The Lobby groups possess a decisive part within the political system of the United States of America since they exert strong influence by means of different measures on the Executive, Legislative, Judicative and the political parties to direct the policies and the legislation in the course of their preferences.3

In the American region the Interest groups are segmented into seven types. There are the so called business groups (e. g. National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)), the unions (e. g. American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)), the lobbying groups of the agricultural sector (e. g. National Farmers Union (NFU)), and professional associations (e. g. American Medical Association (AMA)). Furthermore there are the advocacy groups from single states and cities (e. g. National League of Cities (NLC)), ethnic interest groups (e. g. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)) and single-issue lobbying groups (e. g. Mothers against drunk driving (MADD)).4 The characterization of the American system of interest groups is its very strong decentralized structure, its regional rootedness and its highly specialization founding on the extremely different interests.5 Due to this there is nowadays a very pluralistic system of advocacy groups with more than 20.000 registered associations in America.6 The National Rifle Association (NRA) represents an example of an American interest group. [...]