Investigations of the behaviors of political organizations occur at an intersection of sociology, political science, and organizations studies. This interdisciplinary perspective offers great potential for richly informed understanding and comprehensive theoretical explanation of numerous facets of these crucial social actors and their relationships with the larger society and polity in which they are embedded. Four fundamental questions have dominated research and theorizing in this field over the past several decades: (1) What sociopolitical conditions encourage the creation of political organizations? (2) How are participants recruited and induced to provide crucial resources for political action? (3) What mobilization processes enable political organizations to work together most effectively toward collective ends? (4) What strategies and tactics exert the greatest impact on public policy makers' decisions? This article attempts to provide brief answers to these questions. Although most of the empirical research on political organizations concentrates on the United States, some recent evidence...