DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
AND
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Posc 105
INTEREST GROUPS
- THIS MORNING:
- Summary
- Film: "Washington's Other Scandal."
- Types of decisions
- Interest groups
- RECAP OF TERMS:
- PACs
- Campaign contributions limits
- Soft money
- Independent expenditures and committees
- The film illustrates many of these
- LEVELS OF DECISION MAKING:
- Policy categories
- Trunk: these policies determine
a nation's political and economic agendas
or a significant portion of them.
- Affect the allocation of
public resources.
- Limit or predetermine range of choices
- Subject of long-term discussion and policy making.
- Examples:
- Balanced budget
- Containment
- Branch and twig decisions:
- Implement trunk decisions.
- Examples:
- Types of weapons systems.
- Other categories
- "Neutral distributive"
- Allocates material and symbolic rewards
- Re-distributive:
- Takes from one group and gives to another.
- Symbolic
- Provide
psychological rewards but do not redistribute
goods.
- Generalizations:
- Corruption involves middle-level distributive decisions.
- Trunk decisions frequently made behind the scenes or "invisibly"
- INTEREST GROUP POLITICS:
- To understand American government,
especially the "middle levels" of power one
needs to appreciate the central role interest groups
play in the political process.
- Interest groups compared to political parties:
- Do not try to run government
as a whole, only to protect the interests of
their members.
- Private, not
public, bodies and hence not accountable in the same way
parties are.
- Do not run their own
candidates for office.
- They try to influence
election outcomes, however.
- Generalizations:
- Most visible politics involves
interest group conflict
- Interest group politics
involves mostly "branch and twig" decisions and
mid-range distributive policies.
- The American way of politics:
interest group conflict or pluralism
- The belief in the legitimacy of groups: ours is a
nation that places great
value on private organizations and groups.
- Main "actors" or players are organized
groups, not individuals or unified,
organized political parties.
- Usually, several sets of groups on each side of an issue.
- Politics involves creating coalitions.
- Groups struggle in many arenas (institutions)
for favorable outcomes.
- Groups mobilize resources such as money, skills,
organization, prestige.
- Groups participate in policy
development and especially implementation.
- Tools: contact and access and favors (lobbying),
public relations,
"knowledge," election contributions
- On paper the "system" remain
relatively stable, "balanced," open,
representative
- NEXT TIME:
- Interest groups
- Congress
- Reading:
- Keep working on
Debt and Deficits. Help is on the way.
- Look at "Do Something!" for an
assignment on
campaign finance.
Go to Notes page
Go to American Political System page
Go to H. T. Reynolds page