Pressure Groups and Political Culture (Routledge Revivals)

A Comparative Study

Francis Castles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415557597
• eBook ISBN: 9781135195311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume, first published in 1967, offers a new approach to the study of pressure groups, whose importance in the British political system has been increasingly recognised in recent years. Francis Castles seeks to throw light on this topic, firstly by examining the theoretical approaches to an understanding of their role in the political process and secondy by presenting a number of specific studies. For the first time, in one small volume, the reader can become acquainted with pressure groups in continental Europe, Scandinavia, the United States, the totalitarian countries, and the emergent nations. The study is comprehensive in itself and also an invaluable guide to more detailed work in this field of political science.

1
Pressure group theory and its problems

The study of pressure groups as such is a comparatively recent one, dating from Arthur F.Bentley’s The Process of Government, published in 1908. That this is so is evinced by the almost total confusion of terminology which reigns in the field. Even the term ‘pressure group’ is not accepted by some writers on the grounds that the word ‘pressure’ has pejorative connotations. This being the case, and in order to induce clarity into our subsequent discussions, we shall define some of the more basic points before we proceed. The criticism of the terms because they have pejorative implications is an example of value-impregnation of fact, a phenomenon we have already remarked, but one which seems not unduly difficult to dismiss. The importance of a term to a scientist is its exact defined connotation, not its implication to the uninitiated. However pejorative a term, if we only use it to describe something in accord with a strict definition we can hardly go wrong. Thus we will define pressure groups as ‘any group attempting to bring about political change, whether through government activity or not, and which is not a political party in the sense of being represented, at that particular time, in the legislative body’. This definition has the virtue that it stresses the fact that pressure for political change may in certain ‘political cultures’, particularly in totalitarian regimes and to some extent in primitive societies, not be exerted to change policy, but to change the government, and indeed the form of government. The pressures for political change are in all societies omnipresent, and to ignore, say, ‘nationalist movements’ under this heading is to neglect any similarities imposed on groups by virtue of the factor they have in common: the exertion of political pressure. Even within our own political culture, as we shall see, some groups are more likely than others to feel that the only solution to their problem is the removal of the government, and, if necessary, the forcible imposition of their views. This is particularly true of the minor parties, which our definition includes.

We shall make a sub-classification of pressure groups according to more widely accepted criteria (H.Eckstein, 1960; Allen Potter, 1961) and suggest they fall basically into one of two categories:

• (i) The ‘interest’ group which is set up to protect shared sectional interests.
• (ii) The ‘attitude’ group set up to achieve a specifically delimited objective or cause and which is defined not in terms of the common interests of its members, but in relation to their shared attitudes.

It may be felt that these groups in practice overlap considerably, and of course they do to some extent, but for the most part, one is able to assign a group to one or other of the categories quite easily. The potential membership of an interest group is defined quite simply by the number of individuals belonging to that particular section (thus the Automobile Association has a potential clientele consisting of all British vehicle owners). On the other hand, the possession of a shared attitude is a subjective criterion which makes it harder to delimit a group’s potential membership. Interest groups are on the whole permanent groups which act as the section’s spokesman as long as the section exists, whereas attitude groups are at best semi-permanent, in that they only exist as long as their objective or cause remains unattained.

Pressure group studies

Having defined our terms, let us then examine briefly the sort of work that has been carried out in the study of pressure group behaviour. It is interesting to note that the interest in pressure groups is contemporaneous with two significant developments in the field of Politics. One of these was the pluralist conception of society which to some extent replaced the idea of the individual citizen faced by the monolithic sovereign State. Pluralist theory posits a series of mediating groups between State and citizen, a balance of forces which produces in their conflict social consensus and social policy. With the beginnings of government intervention in the economic sphere, even before the beginning of this century, it came to be felt in some circles that only by organized group action, the combination of the power of a large number of individuals, could the defenceless citizen be protected from the omnipotent State.

The other simultaneous development was the growth of big business and big labour, the large corporations which came in some cases to rival the power of the State. Much of the theorizing about pressure groups has concerned their desirability and much of the confusion on this subject stems from an inability to separate these two developments. We may point to pressure groups as the mediator between State and citizen, or suggest they provide a useful channel of democratic participation between elections, and therefore conclude that they are desirable. At the same time, we may be disturbed about the growing power of vested interests exercising great influence behind locked doors—in other words, Finer’s Anonymous Empire.

Being more interested in what pressure groups do than in whether it is a good thing that they do it, we shall proceed to review the current state of studies in this field. Perhaps the single most striking aspect here is that contemporary study has been almost exclusively on interest rather than on attitude groups. This is to a very great degree a result of the fact that the study of groups is largely a phenomenon of the Anglo-American political scene in which attitude groups do not play as large a part as in other political cultures. Finer’s work Anonymous Empire is a good example of an emphasis on interest groups to the exclusion of other considerations. In it he catalogues the main components of the British ‘group universe’ as follows: the business Lobby; the Labour Lobby; the co-operative movement; the professions; civic groups, churches and educational organizations. Those bodies which might be described as attitude groups are included under civic groups, a term singularly inappropriate to describe the more militant wing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. What information we have on attitude groups is largely the result of books appearing on the more controversial groups—e.g. Christopher Driver’s The Disarmers and Tom Driberg’s recent work on the Moral Rearmers. Such works are in general of an historical and descriptive nature and not intended to give any more generalized insight into the workings of similar groups; in a word, they are untheoretical.

This last comment is not applicable to the various studies of interest groups as such; there have been various suggestions as to how such activities might be analysed. One example is provided by Harry Eckstein’s analysis of the British Medical Association, in which he categorizes the determinants of pressure group activities under the following headings (H.Eckstein, 1960, Chapter 1):

• (i) The form of their activities. Various factors influence the channels of pressure group activity, among them being the nature of the governmental structure, the activities of government (in the sense of which branch plays the major part in decision making), and the ethos of the political system insofar as it is favourable or inimical to pressure group activity as such.
• (ii) Their intensity and scope. Intensity refers to the fervour with which an objective is pursued, and also to the group’s persistence. Scope denotes the ‘number and variety of groups engaged in politics’. The determining factors here are such characteristics as the social legitimation of group activity and the group’s specific aim, and also the extent to which the political structure is able to fulfil the demands made of it.
• (iii) Their effectiveness. The determinants of major importance here are a group’s physical resources, its wealth, membership in relation to potential membership (as we have seen, this is more important in the case of interest groups), and its expertise.

Eckstein further notes that groups tend to articulate themselves on the pattern of the governmental institutions with which they have dealings. That is to say, they develop a similar hierarchy, and in the case of the B.M.A. he illustrates the close ties between the associational hierarchy and the civil service. Other issues which have received some theoretical attention have been the existence of what John Kenneth Galbraith calls ‘counter-vailing’ pressures (J.K.Galbraith, 1958), i.e. where the existence of one interest or attitude group is to some extent cancelled out by one with a contrary purpose—for instance, anti-blood sports groups are to some extent neutralized by the Field Sports Society, which has on occasion been able to mobilize up to 100,000 members (Allen Potter, 1961). The phenomenon of ‘over-lapping’ membership is another which has been discussed, because it provides a curb against the unbridled use of pressure group power. The fact that one is a member of both the R.S.P.C.A. and the Field Sports Society means one is only against fox hunting ‘in principle’. One last, much discussed aspect of interest group activity is the ‘potential group’, that is to say, a group which comes into existence when there is a threat to its implicitly held values. In effect, of course, every group was once a potential group until some sort of threat was felt. An example here might be the gradual growth of the Noise Abatement Societies in the face of ever-increasing jet air transport.

The problems

Thus while it is possible to point to a certain amount of research in the field we may also note certain deficiencies. Most specifically, the state of research on pressure group politics presents two basic problems if we are ever to attain some general categorization in theoretical terms of group politics as it operates in differing political systems. These may be delineated as follows:

• (i) The emphasis on interest groups has led to not altogether acceptable generalization of the categories used in their study to pressure groups as a whole. As an example of this we may take Finer’s definition of the Lobby, that is to say, the sum of groups operating within the Polity: ‘The sum of organizations insofar as they are occupied at any point in time in trying to influence the policy of public bodies, though unlike political parties, never themselves prepared to undertake the direct government of the country’ (Finer, 1958, p. 2) (my italics). What must be noted here is that while such a definition may be entirely fitting for an interest group, it is by no means so obviously applicable to an attitude group, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The history of this movement would seem to indicate that, even if it was not as such an ‘organization willing to take over direct government of the country’, certain integral groups contemplated action whose logical consequences must have in-eluded such an act. In this context we may note various proposals for putting up ‘unilateralist’ candidates, ‘Voter’s Veto’ (a campaign designed to see that voters did not vote for any multilateralist candidate), not to mention the activities of the Committee of One Hundred. (See later chapter 7, Attitude groups in Britain).
• Very often, too, conclusions holding true of interest groups are more dubious in the context of the attitude group. Thus the conception that the group will be articulated on the basis of the governmental institutions with which it deals seems inapplicable to a number of protest movements. Their activity is very largely restricted to ‘grass-roots’ campaigning; they attempt to activate a body of opinion behind their views, but without formal representation to the powers-that-be. That this is so is one reason that C.N.D. was able to preserve a loosely organized campaign structure over a number of years, a structure which at no time involved formal membership, a criterion of prime importance in determining the ‘effectiveness’ of interest groups. Indeed, much of Eckstein’s analysis is vitiated by the attempt to apply categories applicable to groups which consult and negotiate with government departments (interest groups) to the study of attitude groups, which in many instances do not. It is reasonable enough to postulate that the structure of government and its activities are the major determinants of the type of action carried out by those groups which attempt to get favourable administrative and legislative decisions from the government; it is altogether another matter to expect a group which envisages a major alteration in social norms or values to behave in such a way. Thus we may conclude that in any future analysis of pressure groups there is a need for greater concentration on the distinctive aspects of the attitude group.
• (ii) The second problem with which we are faced is presented by pressure group study’s very nature, as an Anglo-American discipline. The modern political analyst professes to be interested in the comparative study of political institutions, but is it in fact possible to apply the categories developed for the analysis of interest groups in other political systems? This question is more apparent when we ask ourselves what constitutes a pressure group in the ‘underdeveloped’ nations. Here we find few sectional groups representing large sections of the population; the groups which do exert power tend to be parts of the traditional aristocratic elite, bureaucracy, church, or perhaps most frequently, the armed forces. Unfortunately the Anglo-American analysis of pressure groups includes none of these, since they are traditionally regarded as politically neutral. But we do not need to go far afield to see the error of this view. The French Army Revolt and de Gaulle’s subsequent rise to power are illustrative of the fact that under certain circumstances (in this case the aftermath of the Indo-Chinese war and the continuing Algerian war of independence) sufficient strain may be produced to activate such groups, even in Western political systems. Furthermore, if we look only at European systems of government, we can see aspects of pressure politics that do not occur in the Anglo-American framework. There is, for instance, the phenomenon of the colonization of a political party by a pressure group, or the converse, where a political party controls the activities of a supposedly autonomous group; an example of the former would be the influence of the Catholic Church on the French Christian Democratic Party (the M.R.P.) and of the latter, the Communist Party’s control of a large part of the French trade union movement (the C.G.T.). All this indicates the need for a comparative approach to the study of pressure groups; an approach which explains, not only the variations we have noted as between interest and attitude groups, but also the cross-cultural differences we have just noted.

The structural-functional approach

When we say there is need for a comparative approach we do not, in fact, mean that the more conventional methods of the discipline of ‘Comparative Politics’ are the most appropriate. Basically these methods would appear to fall into two categories:

• (i) The ‘country-by-country approach. The objective here is the presentation of a political system in its total configuration. As an example we might cite Sir Ivor Jennings’ The British Constitution, which deals with all aspects of the British political structure.
• (ii) The comparison of a particular political institution as it operates in the context of varying political environments. An example here would be K.C.Wheare’s Legislatures.

There is no doubt that for many purposes both methods have their advantages and there is no doubt at all that both have a large and influential body of academic adherents. Nonetheless, as B.E.Brown points out, both suffer from a fundamental weakness, that such descriptive work, however many countries are dealt with, is in no sense cumulative. A great deal of information, mainly of an empirical nature, may be derived from both the above approaches, but neither is really able to relate salient features of disparate political systems. We have here what Brown calls the ‘layer-cake’ approach, since ‘the result is to put one layer of information on top of another and so on until the observer runs out of countries, time or interest’ (B.E.Brown, 1962, p. 2).

As an alternative to the methods described we suggest the use of structural-functional analysis as a theoretical approach capable both of helping to explain the phenomena with which we deal in Politics, and also as a valid basis for comparison within and between political systems. This approach stresses a number of concepts which would be important in a comparative context. One is the idea of system. This concept in part owes its intellectual origin to the study of Physiology, which pictures the organism as a self-maintaining system, the continued existence of which is promoted by the fulfilment of certain basic functions. Within this system are others, such as the endocrinal system and the nervous system, which through constant interaction and reaction with the organism’s environment, preserve a balance which is called ‘life’. Without in any way trying to stretch this analogy too far, it seems a very fruitful approach to society to see it in terms of a social system containing within it a number of sub-systems, which interact with each other. Talcott Parsons in his work Economy and Society delineates four such subsystems: adaptive, goal attainment, integrative and latency. The adaptive sub-system is that through which the society’s resources are allocated, the goal attainment sub-system is that through which the society’s shared goals are put into practice, this being particularly important to us, since this sub-system is largely synonymous with what we call the Political. What is of relevance here, however, is the concept of interchange at the boundaries of sub-systems; it is in this sphere that the economic affects the political and so on. The idea that Politics, Economics, etc., are interconnected is nothing new, but Functionalism does at least have the virtue that it stresses the fact. Moreover, it stresses not only a one-way traffic; interaction is mutual and not only between the systems we have mentioned; at the integrative boundary the ‘support’ of political groups is exchanged for authoritative policy decisions, that is to say group demands are met in return for endowing individuals with powerful ‘status-roles’ (Talcott Parsons, 1965). In the specific context of political studies we get the concept of ‘political culture’, which forms an environment or backdrop to the political stage and forms the attitudes of the actors and shapes the workings of the political institutions they have set up (Almond and Verba, 1963).

A further conceptual advantage of this approach is its idea of ‘function’. Having earlier pointed out the lack of any cumulative method in the study of comparative Politics, I should like to suggest how the concept of function can help us. The goal attainment sub-system exists because for society to continue it must postulate certain ends chosen from a limited set of alternatives, and for these ends to be translated into concrete action necessitates requirements or functions of the system. As an example we will cite Gabriel Almond’s division of political functions as presented in the introduction to Almond and Coleman’s The Politics of Developing Areas. Here he posits a balance of input and output functions that the political system must carry out:

Input	Output
Political socialization and recruitment	Rule making
Political communication	Rule application
Interest articulation	Rule adjudication
Interest aggregation

With two exceptions the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: the ‘science’ of politics
• 1 Pressure group theory and its problems
• 2 The emergent nations
• 3 Totalitarianism
• 4 Continental Europe—the politics of immobility
• 5 Scandinavia
• 6 The Anglo-American system—the autonomous interest group
• 7 Attitude groups in Britain
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography