Interest-Group Leaders as an Elite.
The work of interest groups is sufficiently central to policy making that it makes sense to think of leaders of interest groups as members of a governing elite, along with high-level governmental functionaries and business executives.
Interest-group leaders range from persons of great influence to persons merely busy rather than influential. But if the term elite refers to groups that are small relative to the whole citizenry end that exercise greatly disproportionate political influence, the most influential interest group leaders certainly would qualify.
This is especially true of those who share actual authority when governmental policy makers delegate responsibility for public policy making to private parties.
This happens in wholesale fashion for many economic decisions in a market-oriented soeiety, as discussed in chapter
1. But such delegation is not limited to business managers; committees of the American Bar Association, for example, not government officials, wrote the corporate laws of least fifteen states. And many European political systems explicitly incorporate both labor and business in corporatist policy making.