Consumer Organizations – a Social Movement or Public Interest Groups? And Who, Exactly, Is the Public?

Yaniv Ron-El, University of Chicago

Interest groups are usually viewed as promoting some kind of special interest. Even those that are not associated with private interest and corporate lobbying commonly advocate for a relatively narrow issue, such as environmental groups or pro-life/pro-choice groups. Can interest groups promote the public interest? What would such interest mean? And how do such “public interest groups” justify their claims to speak on behalf of “the public”? This paper explores these questions, and the blurry boundaries between social movements and interest groups, by focusing on consumer organizations that were part of the American consumer movement’s heyday in the 1970s. I focus specifically on the “Public Interest Research Groups,” or PIRGs, that deliberately and expressly presumed to promote and represent the Public Interest. This loose federation of local organizations mushroomed on various university campuses, following a model proposed by Ralph Nader. While each group promoted issues according to its own selection, most of them were consumer-related. Drawing on archival research on a specific and very active group - the Missouri PIRG - and on a comparison with another consumer organization, the National Consumer Law Center, which also focused on activities like lobbying for, and proposing models of, consumer-oriented legislation, but with emphasis on low-income consumers, I will show how these organizations understood and perceived the “public” whose interest they claimed to promote, how did they justify these claims using both mobilization of “the public” in a social movements manner and social-scientific methods of surveying. Additionally, I will show what kind of boundary-work they had to perform in order to define the elusive categories of “the public” and “consumers”. The findings and discussion will contribute to, and demonstrate the need to consider seriously, the similarities and differences between the study of social movements and interest groups.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 262. Theorizing the political