Politics by Andrew Heywood

Author:Andrew Heywood
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

Models of group politics

Some commentators believe that the pattern and significance of group politics are derived entirely from factors that are specific to each political system. The role of groups thus reflects a particular political culture (see p. 172), party system, set of institutional arrangements, and so on. This means that general conclusions cannot be drawn about the nature of group politics. On the other hand, the understanding of group politics is often shaped by broader assumptions about both the nature of the polit ical process and the distribution of power in society. These assumptions are closely linked to the rival theories of the state examined in Chapter 3. The most influential of these as models of interest group politics are the following:

pluralism

corporatism

the New Right.

Pluralist model

Pluralist theories offer the most positive image of group politics. They stress the capacity of groups to both defend the individual from government and promote democratic responsiveness. The core theme of pluralism (see p. 100) is that political power is fragmented and widely dispersed. Decisions are made through a complex process of bargaining and interaction that ensures that the views and interests of a large number of groups are taken into account. One of the earliest and most influential attempts to develop a pluralist ‘group theory’ was undertaken by Arthur Bentley in The Process of Government ([1908] 1948). Bentley’s emphasis on organized groups as the fundamental building blocks of the political process is neatly summed up in his famous dictum: ‘when the groups are adequately stated, everything is stated’. David Truman’s The Governmental Process (1951) is usually seen to have continued this tradition, even if his conclusions were more narrowly focused on the US political process.

Enthusiasm for groups as agents of interest articulation and aggregation was strengthened by the spread of behaviouralism in the 1950s and early 1960s. Systems analysis, for example, portrayed interest groups as ‘gatekeepers’ that filtered the multiple demands made of government into manageable sets of claims. At the same time, community power studies carried out by analysts such as Robert Dahl (1961) and Nelson Polsby (1963) claimed to find empirical support for the pluralist assertion that no single local elite is able to dominate community decision-making.

From the pluralist perspective, group politics is the very stuff of the democratic process. Indeed, it became common in the 1960s to argue that a form of pluralist democracy (see p. 101) had superseded more conventional electoral democracy, in that groups and organized interests had replaced political parties as the principal link between government and the governed. The central assumptions of this theory are that all groups and interests have the potential to organize and gain access to government, that they are internally responsive in the sense that leaders broadly articulate the interests or values of their members, and that their political influence is roughly in line with their size and the intensity of their support. One way in which this was demonstrated was by evidence that political power is fragmented in such a way that no group or interest can achieve dominance for any period of time.

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