Organized interest groups develop considerable expertise on the political issues they seek to influence, and subsequently communicate information and analysis to the public in their efforts to shape both policy and public opinion.

While we expect interest groups to provide data and interpretations that best support their position on specific issues, we also expect competing groups to offer countervailing arguments and different viewpoints. These are ideal expectations, and if they are even roughly met, they help increase public knowledge about the issue under discussion by exposing us to competing views.

In this ideal scenario colored by pluralism, there are always two or more groups offering different views of every public policy decision or governmental action. Competing groups would have roughly equal access to the resources necessary to publicize their view, and their competing positions (as long as they are basically reasonable) would receive roughly equal public exposure. This rosy portrait of full and informed public deliberation also assumes that the public is both present and paying attention.

In practice, many governmental decisions and actions "fly under the radar." Elected officials and executive agencies make so many decisions that it is difficult for citizens to know exactly what their state government is doing. Interest groups and their representatives sometimes rely on this lack of public attention to get favorable action from the government. In a world in which groups have vastly different levels of resources at their disposal, in which the costs of doing politics are high and rising, and in which the policy agenda is ever more crowded, our ideal expectations about how interest groups behave are rarely met.

Yet whatever the imperfections of the overall system, we rely on interest groups to provide information about public policy and government decisions. As veteran lobbyist Jack Gullahorn argues argues in a Texas Politics interview, interest groups and their advocates are exercising a fundamental right when they participate in the legislative process as a member of an interest group or as a lobbyist. Despite the fact that the actual conditions of public discussion shaped by interest group competition don't always meet ideal expectations, interest groups nonetheless convey information both to the public and to policy makers. Over time, interest groups develop considerable expertise in the areas to which they are dedicated, and this information is incorporated into the making of policy and law. Interest groups often provide what we might call "interested expertise" - facts and analyses designed to shape opinions in a way that reflects their objectives and interpretations of issues. The political system relies on the clash of competing interests, however imperfectly or unevenly matched, to prevent policy disasters or to correct them when they do occur.