La ricerca sui gruppi di interesse negli ultimi quindici anni: tendenze internazionali con uno sguardo sull’Italia

For a long time, the study of interest groups has been considered as a relatively small field within political science. In spite of this, over the last fifteen years an impressive amount of empirical research on interest group has been produced. The main aim of this paper is exactly to review this 'newer' literature, in order to answer the following questions: which are the main topics scholars deal with? Which journals tend to publish more articles on interest groups? Are there widespread research designs or do scholars recur to different methodological approaches? Which are the most frequent case studies? Results show a vital community dealing with many themes, preferring quantitative approaches, and analysing a few case studies. Unfortunately, within this community Italian scholars are peripheral actors.