POWER & AUTHORITY:POLICY NETS & LOBBYING

Textbook images of U.S. government gloss over the impact of political organizations & interest groups in shaping local, state, national public policies through lobbying on policy issues of great importance to their members’ and constituents’ interests.

Political sociologists & political scientists study the institutional political structures and policy processes, which may help to answer some questions about such Congressional actions as:

Why did the House Republicans’ 2002 economic stimulus bill return $21 billion in corporate minimum taxes (paid since 1986!) to General Electric, IBM, General Motors & others?

Why did the Democratic Senate’s version of that bill propose to give personal tax rebates, extended unemployment benefits, and health coverage for out-of-work taxpayers?

Why did the bill give $10 million to bison-ranchers like Ted Turner, but no subsidies for depleted food pantries?

Power Is RelationalPower is inherently the property of a relationship between two or more actors. Max Weber’s two famous definitions explicitly asserted that power (Macht) is not the resources held by an actor, but occurs during situated interactions among actors with potentially opposed interests and goals.

‘Power’ is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which that probability rests. (1947:152)

We understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action. (1968:962)

Some power is based on force (coercion). But, if actors willingly assent or consent to obey another’s commands, power becomes legitimate authority (Herrschaft), which may be based on actors’ traditional, charismatic, or rational-legal beliefs in the rightness of their relationship.

Collective Action SystemsCollective action systems – such as legislatures, courts, regulatory agencies – make public policy decisions about numerous proposed laws and regulations.

Organized interest groups hold varying pro- and con- preferences across multiple policy decisions. Coalitions lobby public officials to choose outcomes favorable to coalitional interests. Decision makers may also hold policy preferences, and may change their votes on some events to gain support for preferred decisions.

Models of socially embedded policymaking explore how network relations shape collective decisions by information exchanges, political resources, persuasion, vote-trading (log-rolling), and other dynamic processes.

“Je weniger die Leute davon wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden, desto besser schlafen sie.” Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-98) [The less people know about how sausages

and laws are made, the better they'll sleep.]

Political OrganizationsAre organized interest groups substantially different from SMOs?

Conventional views that social movements represent outside challengers trying to get their views heard inside the polity; e.g., feminist, anti-war, gay-lesbian, civil rights. SMOs may resort to illegitimate tactics such as street protests and violence.

Interest groups are legitimate insiders that pressure officials using conventional political tactics, such as letters, emails, and meetings.

Alternative views deny any meaningful distinctions

Both SMOs & political orgs deploy the full range of tactics in efforts to influence outcomes of public policymaking

Dual democratic functions of political orgs

1. Aggregate and represent some citizens’ policy preferences to elected & appointed public officials

2. Provide channel for officials to communicate about benefits to their electoral constituencies

Proliferating Political OrgsPopulation ecology analysis of trade association founding & deaths rates reveals growth dynamics during 20th century

Since 1960s, Washington and state capitals saw rapidly rising numbers of business, professional, labor, ethnic-racial, women’s, environmental, governmental, & other political interest orgs.

Peak business ass’ns – NAM, BRT, Chamber of Commerce – reacted to increasing federal gov’t intervention into the workplace & economy.

Lobbying Strategies

Lobbying is NOT political bribery nor is it overt quid pro quo dealing. Influence requires making the most persuasive case:

Lobbyists give friendly policy makers the information, substantive analyses, and politically accurate arguments about why they should support the organization’s preferred solutions, instead of backing their opponents’ so obviously inferior and indefensible policy proposals.

Successful political interest organizations mobilize their resources to achieve three strategic goals (Browne 1998):

Winning attention – “outside game” keeping the publicity spotlight on the org’s issue agenda, through the mass media & in legislative and regulatory arenas

Making contact – “inside game” of schmoozing & building close network ties to officials, lobbyists, and other brokers

Reinforcement – “lobbyists keep coming back, showing their issues are still alive, reinforcing both their access and previously discussed policy matters”

Lobbying TacticsPolitical organizations deploy various tactics to influence elected & appointed officials. In a roughly descending frequency scale:

Public testimony at legislative or agency hearings

Direct contacts with legislators or other officials

Informal contacts with legislators or other officials

Presenting research results

Coalitions with other groups; planning strategy with government officials

Mass media: talking to journalists; paid advertising

Policy formation: drafting legislation, regulations; shaping policy implementation; serving on advisory commissions; agenda-setting

Constituent influence: letter-writing or telegram campaigns; working with influential citizens; alerting legislators to district effects

Litigation: filing lawsuits or amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs

Elections: campaign contributions; campaign work; candidate endorsements

Protests or demonstrations

Other: monitoring; influencing appointments; personal favors for officials

Lobbying CoalitionsWhen its interests are at stake in a Congressional bill or regulatory ruling, a political org can lobby alone or in coalition

Most political orgs work in coalitions; a division of labor

Coalitions are short-lived affairs for specific narrow goals

To impose or lift restrictions on Persian rug imports

Partners in next coalition change with the specific issues

“Politics makes strange bedfellows”: The Patriot Act

Orgs that lobby together succeed more often than soloists

Broad cleavages emerge within some policy domains

Business vs Unions in labor policy domain

Healthcare providers vs pharmaceutical & equipment manufacturers

Policy Networks & Policy DomainsPolicy network analysts seek to explain the formation of state-interest organization networks, their persistence & change over time, and the consequences of network structures for public policy-making outcomes.

POLICY DOMAIN: “a set of interest group organizations, legislative institutions, and govt’l executive agencies that engage in setting agendas, formulating policies, gaining access, advocating positions, organizing collective influence actions, and selecting among proposals to solve delimited substantive policy problems, such as national defense, education, agriculture, or welfare.” (Laumann & Knoke 1987)

“A policy network is described by its actors, their linkages and its boundary. It includes a relatively stable set of mainly public and private corporate actors. The linkages between the actors serve as channels for communication and for the exchange of information, expertise, trust and other policy resources. The boundary of a given policy network is not in the first place determined by formal institutions but results from a process of mutual recognition dependent on functional relevance and structural embeddedness.” (Kenis & Schneider 1991)

Developers include British (Rhodes, Marsh), German (Pappi, Schneider, Mayntz), American (Laumann, Knoke) political scientists & sociologists

The Organizational StateThe Organizational State (1987) conceptualized a national policy domain’s power structures as multiplex networks among formal organizations, not elite persons. These connections enable opposing coalitions to mobilize political resources in collective fights for influence over specific public policy decisions.

Power structure: revealed in patterns of multiplex networks of information, resource, reputational, and political support among organizations with partially overlapping and opposing policy interests.

Action set: subset of policy domain orgs sharing common policy preferences, pool political resources, and pressure governmental decisionmakers to choose a policy outcome favorable to their interests. After a decision, opposing action sets typically break apart as new events give rise to other interest constellations.

Comparing Policy Networks Methods

Identify organization population from public-source activities

Compile sets of issues & dated events from public records

Construct identical national questionnaires by cross-translation

Interview key org’l informant on attribute & network data

Complete networks require 90%+ response rates

Network methods to analyze, compare national policy domains

Theoretical principles and empirical data collection & analysis methods developed in The Organizational State were adapted and applied in a study of national labor policy domains in the U.S., Germany, and Japan, Comparing Policy Networks (Knoke et al. 1996).

Central methodological procedures involved:

Next MDS plot of core U.S. labor policy domain in 1988 shows interest orgs with short direct or indirect communication distances, although many took the opposing sides on recurrent labor policy fights (e.g., AFL-CIO vs. NAM, Business Round Table, Chamber of Commerce).

Labor Domain Communication Core 

AFL-CIO

ASCM

TEAM

UAWABC

BRT

CHAM

NAM

NEA

AARP

ACLU

NGA

DOL

OSHA

WHO

HR

HD

SR

SD

NLRB

-1.5 0.0 +1.5

+1.5                0.0               -1.5

SOURCE: Knoke. 2001. Changing Organizations. Westview.

Political Cleavages on Policy Events

SOURCE: p. 354 in Knoke. 2001. Changing Organizations.

Memberships in action sets for 3 U.S. labor policy domain events revealed overlapping patterns of organizational interests in influencing these policy decisions.

The labor and business coalitions comprise a core set of advocates (AFL vs. Chamber of Commerce) plus event-specific interest organizations, particularly nonlabor allies of unions.

Who Wins Policy Fights?

No single political organization or enduring coalition prevails on every issue & event of importance to it; incrementalism prevails

Biggest PAC contributors & campaign workers may enjoy greater access, easier victories on uncontested policy & pork proposals

Roll-call analyses of Congressional votes find small lobbying effects relative to other factors (party affiliation, constituencies)

Lobbying impacts greatest in specific policy events, depending on strength of opposition’s resources & political arguments

Elected officials also pay attention to unorganized voters’ opinions, especially within their districts

• Shockingly, some politicians even adhere to their ideological principles & some will ride personal hobby-horses!

We know much less about the systematic influence of political action on the outcomes of public policy fights

Dialectical Influences

Marsh & Smith’s dialectical model depicts policy outcomes as feeding back to change actors and network structures

Policy outcomes may affect networks by:

1. Changing network membership or the balance of resources within it

2. Altering social contexts to weaken particular interests in relation to a given network

3. Causing agents, who learn by experience, to pursue alternative policy influence strategies & actions

ReferencesAldrich, Howard E. and Udo Staber. 1988. “Organizing Business Interests: Patterns of Trade Association Foundings, Transformations, and Death.” Pp. 111-126 in Ecological Models of Organizations, edited by Glenn Carroll. New York: Ballinger.

Browne, William P. 1998. Groups, Interests, and U.S. Public Policy. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Kenis, Patrick and Volker Schneider. 1991. “Policy Networks and Policy Analysis: Scrutinizing a New Analytical Toolbox.” Pp. 25-62 in Policy Networks: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Considerations, edited by Bernd Marin and Renate Mayntz. Boulder/Frankfurt: Campus/Westview Press.

Knoke, David. 2001. Changing Organizations: Business Networks in the New Political Economy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Knoke, David, Franz Urban Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent and Yutaka Tsujinaka. 1996. Comparing Policy Networks: Labor Politics in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Laumann, Edward O. and David Knoke. 1987. The Organizational State: Social Choice in National Policy Domains. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Marsh, David and M. Smith. 2000. “Understanding Policy Networks: Towards a Dialectical Approach.” Political Studies 48(4):4-21.

Mizruchi, Mark S. and Blyden B. Potts. 2000. “Social Networks and Interorganizational Relations: An Illustration and Adaptation of a Micro-Level Model of Political Decision Making.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 17:225-265.

Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press.

Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press.