Political Order and Political Decay (77 page)

PASSIONS AND INTERESTS

Ordinary Americans express widespread disdain for interest groups and their sway over Congress. The perception that the democratic process has been corrupted or hijacked is not an exclusive concern of either end of the political spectrum; both Tea Party Republicans on the right and liberal Democrats on the left believe that interest groups are exercising undue political influence and feathering their own nests. As a result, trust in Congress has fallen to historically low levels barely above double digits.
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The economist Mancur Olson made one of the most famous arguments about the malign effects of interest group politics on economic growth and ultimately democracy in
The Rise and Decline of Nations
. Looking particularly at the long-term economic decline of Britain throughout the twentieth century, Olson argued that democracies in times of peace and stability tended to accumulate ever-increasing numbers of interest groups. These groups, instead of pursuing wealth-creating economic activities, made use of the political system to extract benefits or rents for themselves. These rents were unproductive in the aggregate and costly to the public as a whole. But the general public had a collective action problem or could not organize as effectively as, for example, the banking industry and corn producers to protect their interests. The result was the steady diversion of energy into rent-seeking activities over time, a process that could be halted only by a large shock like war or revolution.
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This highly negative narrative about interest groups stands in sharp contrast, however, to a much more positive one about the benefits of civil society, or voluntary associations, to the health of democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville in
Democracy in America
noted that Americans had a strong propensity for organizing private associations, which he argued were “schools for democracy” because they taught private individuals the skills of coming together for public purposes. Individuals by themselves were weak; only by joining with others for common purposes could they, among other things, resist tyrannical government. This line of argument has been carried forward by scholars like Robert Putnam, who argues that this very propensity to organize—“social capital”—is both good for democracy and became endangered in the second half of the twentieth century.
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Founding Father James Madison also had a relatively benign view of interest groups. Even if one did not approve of the ends that a particular group was seeking, their diversity over a large country, he argued, would be sufficient to prevent domination by any one group. As political scientist Theodore Lowi noted, “pluralist” political theory in the mid-twentieth century concurred with Madison: the cacophony of interest groups would collectively interact to produce a public interest, just as competition in a free market would provide public benefit through individuals following their narrow self-interests. There were no grounds for the government to regulate this process, since there was no higher ground that could define a “public interest” standing above the narrow concerns of interest groups. The Supreme Court in its
Buckley v. Valeo
and
Citizens United
decisions was in effect affirming the benign interpretation of what Lowi labeled “interest group liberalism.”
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How, then, do we reconcile these diametrically opposed narratives—that interest groups are corrupting democracy and harming economic growth, and that they are necessary conditions for a healthy democracy?

The most obvious way is to try to distinguish a “good” civil society organization from a “bad” interest group. The former could be said to be driven by what Albert Hirschman called the passions, the latter by the interests.
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The former might be a nonprofit organization like a church group seeking to build houses for the poor, or a lobbying organization promoting a policy it believes to be in the public interest, like protection of coastal habitats. An interest group might be a lobbyist for the tobacco industry or large banks, whose only objective is to maximize the profits of the companies supporting it. Robert Putnam tried to make a distinction between small associations that invited active participation by their members and “membership organizations” that simply involved paying a membership fee.
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Unfortunately, this distinction does not hold up to theoretical scrutiny. Just because a group proclaims that it is acting in the public interest does not mean that it is actually doing so. For example, a medical advocacy group that wants more dollars allocated to combating a particular disease may actually distort public priorities by diverting funds from more widespread and damaging diseases, simply because it is better at public relations. Just because an interest group is self-interested doesn't mean that its claims are illegitimate or that it does not have a right to be represented within the political system. If a poorly thought-out regulation will seriously damage the interests of an industry and its workers, they have a right to make that known to Congress. Indeed, lobbyists are often some of the most important sources of information about the consequences of government action. In the long-running battles between environmental groups and corporations, environmentalists purporting to represent the public interest are not always right with respect to the trade-offs between sustainability, profits, and jobs, as the Oakland Harbor dredging case illustrates.
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The most salient argument against interest group pluralism has to do with distorted representation. E. E. Schattschneider, in
The Semisovereign People
, argued that the actual practice of democracy in America had nothing to do with its popular image as government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He noted that political outcomes seldom correspond with popular preferences, that there is a very low level of participation and political awareness, and that real decisions are taken by much smaller groups of organized interests.
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A similar argument is buried in Mancur Olson's framework: he notes that not all groups are equally capable of organizing for collective action. His earlier work,
The Logic of Collective Action
, in fact explained that it is much more difficult to organize large as opposed to small groups, since large groups that provide benefits to all their members invite free riding. In a democratic context, the whole body of citizens (or at least large majorities within them) may share a long-term interest in, for example, a fiscally responsible budget, but any one American feels this much less powerfully than an interest group that would get its subsidy or tax break cut as the result of a budget consolidation. The interest groups that contend for the attention of Congress are therefore not collectively representative of the whole American people. They are representative of the best-organized and (what often amounts to the same thing) richly endowed parts of American society. This bias is not a random one but tends to work against the interests of the unorganized, who are often poor, poorly educated, or otherwise marginalized.
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Morris Fiorina has provided substantial evidence that what he labels the American “political class” is far more polarized than the American people themselves. He presents a wide variety of data showing that on many supposedly contentious issues, from abortion to deficits to school prayer to gay marriage, poll data show that majorities of the American public support compromise positions—for example, use of federal funding to support stem cell research on excess embryos in fertility clinics. Party activists are invariably more ideological and take more extreme positions, whether on the left or right, than the rank-and-file party voters. But the majorities supporting middle-of-the-road positions do not feel very passionately about them, and they are largely unorganized. This means that politics is defined by well-organized activists, whether in the parties and Congress, the media, or lobbying and interest groups. The sum of these activist groups does not yield a compromise position; it leads to polarization and deadlocked politics.
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Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by environmental groups, women's organizations, advocates of gay rights, the aged, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and virtually every other sector of society. In contemporary America, it seems that every disease or medical condition has spawned its own advocacy organization lobbying for increased attention and resources. Pluralist theory holds that the aggregation of all these groups contending with one another constitutes a democratic public interest. But one could argue instead that due to their intrinsic overrepresentation of narrow interests, they undermine the possibility of representative democracy expressing a true public interest.

INTEREST GROUPS AND THE QUALITY OF GOVERNMENT

Interest groups undermine bureaucratic autonomy when they persuade their agents in Congress to issue complex and often self-contradictory mandates to agencies, which are then highly constrained in their ability to exercise independent judgment or make commonsense decisions.

Examples of this abound. Congress wants the federal government to procure goods and services cheaply and efficiently, and yet it mandates a cumbersome set of rules known as the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) on all government procurement agencies. In contrast to private-sector procurement, government purchasing is minutely procedural and subject to endless right of appeal. In many cases, individual members of Congress intervene directly to make sure procurement is done in ways that benefit their own constituents. This is particularly true for the big-ticket items procured by the Pentagon, which become virtual jobs programs to be distributed by lucky members of Congress. While Congress and the public decry “waste, fraud, and abuse” in procurement, fixing the problem by mandating even more detailed and constraining rules only serves to drive up the costs of procurement and to reduce its quality.

There is a further problem with interest groups and the pluralist view that sees public interest as nothing more than the aggregation of individual private interests: they undermine the possibility of deliberation and the way that individual preferences are shaped by dialogue and communication. In both classical Athenian democracy and the New England town hall meetings celebrated by Tocqueville, citizens spoke directly to each other about the common interests of their community. It is easy to idealize these instances of small-scale democracy, or minimize the real differences that exist in large societies. But as any organizer of focus groups will tell you, people's views on highly emotional subjects from immigration to abortion to drugs will change just thirty minutes into a face-to-face discussion with people of differing views, provided that they are given common information and ground rules that enforce civility. Few single-issue advocates will ever maintain that their cause will trump all other good things if forced to directly confront those alternative needs. One of the problems of pluralist theory, then, is the assumption that interests are fixed, and that the goal of the legislator is simply to act as a transmission belt for them, rather than having his or her own views that can be shaped by deliberation.

It is commonly observed that no one in Congress deliberates anymore. Congressional “debate” amounts to a sequential series of talking points aimed not at colleagues but at activist audiences, who are perfectly happy to punish a legislator who deviates from their agenda as a result of deliberation or greater knowledge.

In well-functioning governance systems, a great deal of deliberation occurs not just in legislatures but also in bureaucracies. This is not a matter of bureaucrats simply talking with one another but rather a complex series of consultations among government officials and businesses, outside implementers and service providers, civil society groups, the media, and other sources of information about societal interests and opinions.
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Congress mandated consultation in the landmark 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which required regulatory agencies to publicly post proposed rule changes and to solicit notice and comment. But these consultative procedures often become highly routinized and pro forma, with actual decisions resulting not from internal deliberation but from political confrontations between well-organized interest groups.
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POLITICAL DECAY

The rule of law constitutes a basic protection of individuals against tyrannical government. But in the second half of the twentieth century, law lost its focus as a constraint on government and became instead an instrument for widening the scope of government. In the process, functions that could have been efficiently and accountably carried out in a bureaucracy were given over to a mixture of courts, executive agencies, and private individuals. For fear of empowering “big government,” the United States has ended up with a government that is equally large but actually less accountable because it is in the hands of the courts.

Similarly, legislators as representatives of the people's will are supposed to act to ensure that policies reflect public purposes. But political parties have become hostage to powerful interest groups that collectively do not represent the American electorate. The hold of these groups is strong enough to block sensible public policies on issues from farm subsidies to bank regulation. They have turned the tax code into a confusing welter of privileges and made difficult any kind of impersonal public administration.

The United States tried to establish a modern, Weberian state during the Progressive Era and New Deal. It succeeded in many respects: the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the armed services, and the Federal Reserve are among the most technically competent, well-run, and autonomous government bodies anywhere in the world. But the overall quality of American public administration remains very problematic, precisely because of the country's continuing reliance on courts and parties at the expense of state administration.