The impact of democracy on interest group system institutionalization

This paper provides the first large-N study, which measures the variation in interest group system institutionalization. It shows that the level of democracy is a very strong determinant of strength of interest groups across countries. Findings are corroborated by analysing the Tunisian case to alleviate the reverse causality problem. Implications for comparative interest groups and democracy research are discussed. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.