The divide between interest groups and social movement studies runs deep, but present developments call for a renewed focus on the relevance of these analytical categories. Both of these two forms of collective action relate to organisations that are assumed to follow distinctive logics and strategies for political influence. This article aims to contribute to the debates on the analytical difference between interest groups and social movements by comparing their political strategies and addressing the relevance of the typology for explaining organisations' use of political strategies. The paper draws on a dataset resulting from a large survey among Swedish civil society organisations among which clear cases of interest group organisations and "old" and "new" social movement organisations (SMOs) were identified. The results show that the distinction between interest groups and social movement organisations has some analytical value when it comes to explaining the use of different types of strategies: e.g. direct lobbying and media-based and protest-based strategies. Also, the distinction between old and new SMOs is shown to be relevant because old SMOs seem to be in a way "in between" interest groups and new SMOs suggesting that social movements tend to develop over time and to become more similar to interest groups.

Radical left-libertarian movements are often regarded as primarily seeking ways to accom-plish social and political change outside the framework of institutionalized politics. Previous research, however, has paid little or no attention to the question of these activists' actual interactions with institu-tionalized politics, nor has it addressed the ways these interactions could be understood in relation to their overall strategies and ideology. This article therefore explores whether, and to what extent, such interaction actually occurs and analyzes the meanings and motives radical left-libertarian activists from anarchist, autonomist, and anarcho-syndicalist groups attribute to various types of political actions, ranging from voting and lobbying to protests and direct action. We furthermore compare activists in Po-land and Sweden, in order to scrutinize whether cross-country differences in "political opportunities" affects the activists' political strategies and ideas about how social and political change can best be ac-complished. Contrary to popular beliefs and many activists' own self-declarations, our analysis shows that radical left-libertarian groups do in fact try to achieve political change by interacting with institution-alized politics. While radical left-libertarian activists do in most cases prefer "direct action", this article explores how a more complex relationship to institutionalized politics allows them to accomplish real and immediate changes at the grassroots level.