Nothing to fear, but fear itself? Exploring the importance of mortality anxiety for interest group research

This paper explores how the concept of ‘mortality anxiety’ fits into the literature on interest groups. Most of the relevant literature has used mortality anxiety as a proxy for organizational survival. Recent studies, however, highlight that this is not a very accurate proxy, hereby questioning the overall usefulness of the concept for the literature. This paper argues that mortality anxiety may still have an important place in the literature, but not in the way it was originally intended, namely to understand the political strategies of interest organizations. Organizations which fear for their survival, we argue, should make substantially different strategic choices than organizations absent of this fear. As a consequence, mortality anxiety is still a critical variable for the interest groups and non-profit literature. We empirically illustrate our argument based on data from a survey project in five countries (N = 2904): Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Slovenia.