Where Have All the Consumers Gone
Despite a promising start, organized consumer activity at the national level was largely neglected as a research topic by political scientists in the 1980s. 1 Recent accounts of public interest group activity mention consumers only in passing and focus instead on governmental reform organizations like Common Cause or environmental organizations.2 Whether or not the generalizations drawn based on those parts of the public interest community apply to consumer organizations has not been thoroughly explored. The general inattention and the charges of failure made by some accounts would lead an observer to conclude that organized consumer activity has disappeared or become entirely ineffective.3 At the