When do membership-based civil society organizations such as interest groups, political parties or service-oriented organizations consider their existence under threat? Distinguishing pressures of organizational self-maintenance from functional pressures of goal attainment, which all voluntary membership organizations – irrespective of their political or societal functions - need to reconcile, we propose a framework theorizing distinct categories of drivers of mortality anxiety in organized civil society. To test our hypotheses, we apply ordered logistic regression analysis to new data covering regionally and nationally active interest groups, service-oriented organizations and parties in Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the UK. We find that factors enhancing intraorganizational resilience thereby facilitating self-maintenance as well as exposure to different representation challenges complicating goal attainment have significant effects on mortality anxiety experienced by interest groups, political parties and service-oriented organizations alike – the former reducing, the latter enhancing it. Stressing the importance of a stable, durable organizational infrastructure with loyal and involved members to operate in increasingly volatile and diverse environments, our findings highlight the on-going importance of ‘traditional’ (sometimes considered ‘outdated’) organization-building.

We compare and contrast the network formation of interest groups across industry and issue area. We focus on membership interest groups, which by virtue of representing the interests of voluntary members face particular organizational and maintenance constraints. To reveal their cooperative behavior we build a network dataset based on cosigner status to United States Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs and analyze it with exponential random graph models and multidimensional scaling. Our methodological approach culminates in a clear and compact spatial representation of network similarities and differences. We find that while many of the same factors shape membership networks, religious, labor, and political organizations do not share the same structure as each other or as the business, civic and professional groups.