In our chapter this week we discussed Interest Groups, "organizations that citizens form to influence policymakers" (p.137), and Social Movements,"a group of people with a common ideology who try together to achieve certain general goals" (p. 137). I feel like this chapter made me have an ah-ha moment. I started to understand what Lobbyists do and who they are supporting. I started to see historical events from their roots of social movements and be able to put together the final results. Were the original founders of our country involved in a social movement? I had always thought that social movements were radical protests and unruley and people getting pepper srayed and taken to jail. In my head it seemed like they were not very effective. It always seemed like the way to go about getting results was Interest Groups, but I didn't know all that goes into the special interest groups. Like everything else that we have seen with politics, businesses make up the largest interest groups and the largest number of groups. They spend billions of dollars of year on hiring experts to influence policymakers. While Interest Groups tend to be more organized than Social Movements, they both want basically the same thing, to influence policymakers and to motivate other voters to vote on their behalf-to be heard! I guess I never thought of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to be social movements because of the massive effect they had. It is amazing how much work one person can do when backed by many! The grouping of people bound with a similar belief can be like a pebble in the ocean creating waves.
"Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist."
Richard M. Nixon~37th President (1969-1974)
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