Those with a common interest or shared cause are entitled to band together and press their case to decision-makers in government or Parliament. Traditional pluralist accounts of democracy did not see such activity as a threat to democracy, and the presence of large numbers of interest groups was seen as a sign of the health of a democratic system. Indeed, only authoritarian systems of government sought to organise and control categories of interest that might be a potential threat to their survival, either through corporatist arrangements in other right-wing authoritarian regimes or through party organisations in Communist regimes.
Pluralists believed that competing interests balanced each other out. For each interest, there was a countervailing interest putting an opposing point of view, for example, employer interests were counterbalanced by trade unions. There were multiple points of access to the political system for all these competing interests and government acted as an umpire or arbiter between them (Box 1).
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