Transcript Policy Networks

POWER STRUCTURES, 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 recent Congressional actions:
•
Why did the Republican House’s 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
personal tax rebates, extended unemployment benefits,
health-care for out-of-work taxpayers?
•
Why did the bill give $10 million for 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 involving 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/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.
An actor’s structural interest is “a revealed preference,
for a particular outcome, resulting from identifiable
social constraints or influence,” which may differ from
an unconstrained preference (Mizruchi & Potts 2000:231).
Models of socially embedded policymaking explore how
network ties shape collective decisions through
information exchanges, political resource, persuasion,
vote-trading (log-rolling), and other dynamic processes.
POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS
Are organized interest groups substantially different from SMOs?
Conventional view 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 TACTICS
Political orgs deploy a range of lobbying tactics to influence
elected & appointed officials. In descending frequency of use:
• 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 amici curiae (friend of the court) briefs
• Elections: campaign contributions; campaign work; candidate endorsements
• Protests or demonstrations
• Other: monitoring; influencing appointments; doing personal favors for officials
LOBBYING STRATEGIES
Lobbying is NOT political bribery nor overt quid pro quo
dealing. Influence requires making the most persuasive case:
Lobbyists give friendly policy makers the information, substantive
analyses, & politically accurate arguments about why they should
support the org’s preferred solutions, instead of their opponents’
clearly inferior & indefensible proposals.
Successful political orgs 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”
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 governmental 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 and Knoke. 1987. The Organizational State)
“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 and Schneider 1991)
The ORGANIZATIONAL STATE
The Organizational State (1987) conceptualized 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 is revealed in patterns of multiplex networks of information,
resource, reputational, and political support among organizations with partially
overlapping and opposing policy interests. (See blockmodel figures of U.S., German,
Japanese labor policy domains in Chapter 8 of Knoke et al. [1996].)
Action set is a subset of policy domain orgs that share common policy preferences,
pool political resources, and pressure governmental decisionmakers to choose a policy
outcome favorable to their interests. After a policy decision, the opposing action sets
typically break apart as new events give rise to other constellations of interest orgs.
POLICY DOMAIN COMMUNICATION NETS
National policy domains – orgs and institutions engaged
in efforts to create/change specific policy proposals to
solve substantive problems
EX: health, energy, labor, agriculture, defense
Individuals are agents acting on behalf of orgs’ interests (Marsh &
Smith 2000), encountering principal-agent problems
Orgs central in a policy domain maintain numerous
communication ties, facilitating collaboration & policy
information exchanges with potential partners and with
their opponents (for political intelligence gathering)
Fig 9.6 (next slide) is a MDS plot showing the core of the U.S. labor
policy domain in 1988. These interest orgs lie at short direct or indirect
communication distances, even though many took the opposing sides on
recurrent labor policy fights (e.g., AFL-CIO vs National Assn of
Manufacturers, 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
LOBBYING TOGETHER or ALONE?
Interest org confronts transaction-cost and free-riding questions in
deciding when to join others in an action set or to lobby alone?
• Its actions would have almost no impact on
obtaining the “collective good” (public policy)
• It would maximize its gains by contributing
nothing yet enjoying whatever policy benefits the
other participants might succeed in producing
Mancur Olson’s solution? Offer selective incentives
for orgs to join a coalition: access to contacts,
insider information, enhanced org’l reputation as a
powerful policymaking “player” in a policy domain
Marie Hojnacki (1997) found that fewer than one-third of 172 orgs worked
alone in lobbying on five policy proposals:
• Org with very narrow issue interests was more likely to work by itself
• If opponents were strongly organized & allies saw the interest org as
crucial to their policy success, then it was more likely to join coalition
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
EX: impose or lift restrictions on Persian rug imports
• Partners in next coalition change with the specific issues
“Politics makes strange bedfellows” EX: Civil liberties
• Orgs that lobby together succeed more often than soloists
• Broad cleavages emerge within some policy domains
EX: Business vs Unions in labor policy domain (next slide)
POLITICAL CLEAVAGES on 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
What implications for Ruling Class, Elite, & Pluralist models?
• Biggest PAC contributors & campaign workers may enjoy greater
access, easier victories on uncontested policy & pork proposals
But why Big Tobacco’s setbacks? Union failure to block NAFTA?
• Roll-call analyses of Congressional votes find small lobbying effects
relative to other factors
• Lobbying impacts greatest in particular policy events, depending on
strength of opposition’s resources & political arguments
• Elected officials also pay attention to unorganized voter opinions
• Shockingly, some even hold ideological principles & 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.
Hojnacki, Marie. 1997. “Interest Groups’ Decisions to Join Alliances or Work Alone.” American Journal of
Political Science 41:61-87.
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.
Wber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press.