Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xi + 459 pp. $58.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Abstract

The People's Lobby is a pathbreaking book that uses organizational sociology to reinterpret the decline of the party system and the birth of interest-group politics in the United States at the beginning of this century. In a striking blend of rigorous empirical research and innovative use of institutional theory, Elisabeth Clemens crafts a challenging analysis of the remaking of American political culture, one which emphasizes the agency of ordinary people working through popular organizations. Simultaneously a synthesis of decades of historiography and a bold reinterpretation, this work poses a challenge which every future scholar of twentieth-century politics and political movements will have to take into account.