Transcript SOC 8311 Basic Social Statistics

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 Relational
Power 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 Systems
Collective 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 conpreferences 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
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-98)
werden, desto besser schlafen sie.”
[The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep.]
Political Organizations
Are 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 Orgs
Population 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 Tactics
Political 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 Coalitions
When 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 Domains
Policy 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.
Developers include British (Rhodes, Marsh), German (Pappi, Schneider,
Mayntz), American (Laumann, Knoke) political scientists & sociologists
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)
The Organizational State
The 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
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:
 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
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
+1.5
NLRB
HD
ACLU
SD
SR
NEA
UAW
ABC
AARP
CHAM
NAM
0.0
BRT
DOL
HR
AFL-CIO
TEAM
OSHA
ASCM
NGA
WHO
-1.5
-1.5
0.0
SOURCE: Knoke. 2001. Changing Organizations. Westview.
+1.5
Political Cleavages on Policy Events
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 eventspecific interest
organizations,
particularly nonlabor
allies of unions.
SOURCE: p. 354 in Knoke. 2001. Changing Organizations.
Who Wins Policy Fights?
We know much less about the systematic influence of
political action on the outcomes of public 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!
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
References
Aldrich, 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.