Political Parties And Interest Groups Essay

“Are PACs and Interest Groups replacing the roles of parties” is an unfair question. PACs and Interest Groups have different roles in the electoral process than the American Political Party does. Posing the question like this steers the person answering the question to make the assumption that PACs, Interest Groups and political parties all have the same goal or purpose. And, that is genuinely incorrect for the most part. They may both have similar preferences with an election or passage of legislation. But, Interest Groups and Parties have primarily different roles in the process. So therefore, PACs and Interest Groups will not replace the roles of parties by definition or even the actual physical position in the legislative process. An Interest Group represents a group of people that have a similar issue or desire (Holyoke 2014, 11). An Interest group will not gain power by electing their member to office. By definition they only represent a small portion of the over all electorate anyway. They have an informal influence in government (Holyoke 2014, 11). Interest Groups may prefer and support candidates that favor their specific cause. But there is a distinct difference that hinders the replacement of one or the other. Vice a versa, political parties are not interest groups. Leon D. Epstein defined the political
Reviewing party unity voting over the last several years will offer a chilling effectiveness toward accessing PAC’s contributions’ influence in the influence of legislation. The percentage of party unity votes has been at or near majority since 1989 (Brewer 2012, 347). And, upon a deeper examination of the process if one were to look at the daily operative process of Congress, political parties maintain a unique and powerful role in the influence of legislative behavior that can never be replaced by PACs or Interest