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Popular Participation: Exercise 2 - Types and activities of interest groups
Instructions:
Read the passage and click on the correct answer. If wrong, try
again. Scroll down if you do not see the Answer box. Click
here to review the key terms for this exercise.
There are two general types of interest groups:
economic and non-economic. Economic groups include
business, labor, agricultural and professional groups. Their goals
are to provide jobs, improve members' pay, and protect an occupation
or industry. In addition, individual members and the industry often
profit financially from the group's activities. In the 1990s, members
of the government tried to create a system for universal health care.
The universal healthcare system would have put limits on the amount
of pay doctors could receive, and the amount of money hospitals could
charge for procedures. The American Medical Association, a professional
special interest group, and the insurance industry fought hard against
the universal healthcare proposal and defeated it.
Non-economic groups promote issues they
believe in, but they do not provide members with individual financial
benefits. Instead, members of non-economic groups work for what they
believe is the benefit of society as a whole. Non-economic groups
fall into three categories: public interest, single-issue and ideological
groups. Public interest groups represent the concerns of society as
a whole. Single-issue groups focus their efforts on influencing policy
in just one area, while ideological groups operate from a philosophical
or moral basis, and are interested in influencing policy in a more
general way.
Interest groups receive money from members'
dues, donations, or in the case of a business or corporate interest
group, as part of their budget to pay for their activities. As such,
non-economic interest groups have a more difficult time raising money
and therefore influencing public policy than the economic groups.
Of all the economic groups, business ones are the best funded, the
best organized and the most influential.
Instructions:
Read the passage and click on the correct answer. If wrong, try
again. Scroll down if you do not see the Answer box. 
