Interest Groups and the Governing Process

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 379.

The student may inquire what all these activities of organized groups have to do with politics. Campaigns and elections, it may be repeated, are not the totality of politics. Our conception of the politicalprocess is broad enough to cover all sorts of efforts to guide, influence, or affect governmental action. The striving for power, for status, for privilegeis never-endingand not restricted to campaigns and elections. Administratorstake action every day. Legislators make laws. Organized groups incessantly seek to influence these decisions which are, in a sense, the pay off of the process of politics in which elections are but episodes, albeit significant episodes. The decisions taken between electionsconstitute the basic stuff of politics, the pelf and glory for which men and groups battle. And the stakes of between-elections politics are great. A conservative estimate, say, of the costs imposed on consumers by the public policies borne of the efforts of the sugar lobby would be $100,000,000 annually.

A working conception of the political process must take into account the interactions among groups, interests, and governmental institutions that produce such decisions. Moreover, a working conception of the political system must make a place for organized interest groups: they not only seek to exert influence; they are a part of the political system – elements quite as integral to the system as are political parties.