Pressure Groups
Pressure Groups
Pressure groups are private organizations that attempt to influence the lawmaking process to benefit the members they represent. Though the term has been applied to corporations and nonprofit organizations engaging in advocacy, it properly refers only to organizations that represent factions of the public before government. Pressure groups form when individuals sharing some want or desire that can be realized through public policy mobilize, usually with the aide of an experienced political entrepreneur or wealthy patron. But in a highly diverse society such as the United States, it is rare that policy advancing the interests of one group can be produced without harming those of others. As lawmakers must choose between winners and losers when they divide public resources and enact regulation, pressure groups compete with each other to convince lawmakers to promote and protect their interests by offering campaign contributions and the votes of their members in elections.
The term pressure group is rarely used by social scientists in the early twenty-first century because how scholars view advocacy groups and lobbying has changed. It is more specific than the term interest group because it only conceives of groups as proactively pushing lawmakers to enact policies they desire at the expense of the electorate. This view was part of a larger belief first articulated by American behavioral scientist Arthur Bentley (1870–1957) in 1908, and which came to fruition with the behavioral revolution of the 1950s, that U.S. politics was only about competition among social factions mobilized as pressure groups. Law was simply the outcome of competition favoring the stronger group. For several reasons, however, this view declined in the late 1960s. First a major study in 1963 by Raymond Bauer and his colleagues articulated a more benign view of interest groups gaining access to lawmakers by providing services the latter required, not by pressuring them with threats of electorate reprisals. Second, in 1956 American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that competition among advocacy groups was largely irrelevant because lawmaking was always rigged in favor of a ruling elite. Finally, in 1965 Mancur Olson demonstrated that the whole premise of many groups representing the interests of the public was untenable because the reason groups formed had little to do with any desire to influence policy.
This change from seeing groups as proactively wielding pressure also dampened an important debate among political scientists as to their importance as vehicles of representation in a democratic society. Believing the electorate to be too poorly organized and motivated to hold elected officials accountable through elections, scholars divided into two camps regarding the legitimacy of pressure groups. One, exemplified by political scientist Robert Dahl (1956), argued that groups representing minority factions were a legitimate form of representation, while the other, as described in The Semi-Sovereign People (1942) by E. E. Schattschneider, believed they inhibited political parties from electing slates of candidates that voters could hold responsible for the performance of government. With a decline in the belief of the real power of groups to pressure lawmakers, this debate also faded. New evidence, however, has emerged regarding how truly large and diverse the modern community of interest groups is in U.S. politics, and there is new attention in the early twenty-first century on whether groups might really be competing to shape policy. If so, it may be time to revive this debate over the role of pressure groups in democratic politics and return the term to the political lexicon.
SEE ALSO Behaviorism; Collective Action; Dahl, Robert Alan; Interest Groups and Interests; Mills, C. Wright; Power Elite; Public Policy; Schattschneider, E. E.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bauer, Raymond A., Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Lewis Anthony Dexter. 1963. American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade. New York: Atherton Press.
Bentley, Arthur F. 1908. The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dahl, Robert A. 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
Olson, Mancur, Jr. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schattschneider, E. E. 1942. Party Government. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.
Thomas T. Holyoke