Absolutely, but what I find a bit surprising and certainly disconcerting is that the alternative institution that have been built with a reasonable success, they are not transformed to an alternative political institution. PIRGs and unions are cases in point.
An obvious reason is the winner-takes-all electoral system that, unlike proportional representation (PR), leaves no room for minority alternative institutions - but that does not explain why alternative institutions doe not use different strategies to exercise their political power. One such strategy, implicit in Labor Party organizing and certainly used by business interests, is support of candidates sympathetic to a particular cause regardless of party affiliation.
The way it works is somewhat similar to coalition building under PR but applied to pre-electoral rather than post-electoral politics. Under the PR system, a minority party can maximize its clout in two very different ways, depending on whether it is before the election or after the election.
Before the election, that minority party wants to maximize the number of popular votes, which translate to the number of seats. But since the party appeals to interests that are limited to special constituencies that form numerical minorities - they maximize the number of popular votes by remaining faithful to the interests of their constituents - rather than by compromising and deal cutting.
After the election, however, a minority party under the PR system can maximize their political in exactly the opposite way - by compromising and deal cutting rather than grandstanding. It is so, because in the parliamentary politics the only influence such minority parties can have is by adding weight to much bigger parties and thus swaying the balance of power.
Under the winner-takes-all system, the opposite is true. Sticking to minority principles and ideological grand standing in pre-electoral politics is a sure recipe for a failure - since such minority parties have no chance whatsoever of attracting the majority need to win the election. Under that condition, it makes sense for minority interest to compromise and cut deals with those candidates who are most sympathetic to a particular cause and add weight to their support to help them win the electoral majority.
In the post-electoral politics, by contrast, it makes sense to reverse that and take political grand-standing to remind the allies in offices that they have obligations to special-interest constituents who helped them getting elected.
All that is not rocket science - and the right and business interests figured that out long time ago, as evidenced by their behavior. Many lefties, however, still do not grasp it - as evidenced by their stubborn support of the ephemeral election year candidates like Nader. Such behavior is truly perplexing - it does not seem to be rational at all. The only two explanations that come to mind is (i) a political death wish that for some reason concentrates on the Left, or (ii) treating election in the same way as religious fanatics use churches - as a forum to express their adherence to their dogma rather than a tool to achieve specific policy goals.
Wojtek