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American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory
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AMERICAN BUSINESS,
Thus, it does not, in Dahl's words, exchange relevance for rigor; rather
it is standing proof that the two-relevance and rigor-are not
mutually exclusive goals.
and generalizations about "who rules and why" would we have lacked
without them?1 Because of what it does, what it implies and what it
does not do, American Business and Public Policy provides a proper
occasion for asking these questions and for attempting once again to
1 For similar questions and a critique, see Herbert Kaufman, "The Next Step in
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formulate theories that will convert the discrete facts of the case-studies
into elements that can be assessed, weighed, and cumulated. But, first,
what theories have we now, and how does this significant new study
relate to them ?
It was inevitable that some general notions about power and public
policy would develop out of the case-study literature. Together, these
notions form what is variously called the group theory, the pressuregroup, or the pluralist model of the democratic political system (a
model recently also applied to non-democratic systems). No theory or
approach has ever come closer to defining and unifying the field of
political science than pluralism, perhaps because it fitted so nicely both
the outlook of revered Federalist #io and the observables of the New
Deal. Group theory provided a rationale for the weakness of parties
and the electoral process. It provided an appropriate defense for the
particular programs pursued by the New Deal and successive Administrations. And, more importantly, it seemed to provide an instant
explanation, in more or less generalizable terms, of the politics of each
decision. Analysis requires simply an inventory of the group participants
and their strategies, usually in chronological form-for, after all, politics
is a process. Each group participant is a datum, and power is attributed
in terms of inferred patterns of advantage and indulgence in the final
decision. The extremists have treated government ("formal institutions") as a tabula rasa, with policy as the residue of the "interplay of
forces" measurable as a "parallelogram." More sophisticated analysts
avoided the government-as-blank-key approach by treating officials as
simply other units in the group process, where Congressman and
bureaucrat were brokers but with their own interests and resources.
In group theory, all resources are treated as equivalent and interchangeable. And all the varieties of interaction among groups and
between groups and officials are also treated as equivalent, to such an
extent that only one term is employed for all forms of political inter-
of the coalition and the strategy of its use. Large coalitions beat small
coalitions. System equilibrium (of unquestionably high-priority value
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to pluralists) is maintained by the requirement of majority-size coalitions, which are extremely difficult to create but which must be created
virtually from scratch for each issue. Thus, power is highly decentralized, fluid, and situational. There is no single elite, but a "multicentered"
system in which the centers exist in a conflict-and-bargaining relation
to each other.
As an argument that the group must be the major unit of analysis,
pluralism excites little controversy. But controversy is unavoidable
insofar as the pluralist model implies a theory of power or power
distribution. Most importantly, the pluralist model has, until recently,
failed to take into account the general economic and political structure
within which the group process takes place.2 On this basis, the leading
type of critique of the pluralist model is a set of explicit propositions
about power structure and elites. The typical answer to pluralism is a
straightforward Marxian assumption that there is a one-for-one relation
between socioeconomic status and power over public decisions. Perhaps
the more sophisticated version is a combination Marx-Weber approach
while the pluralist model has failed to take the abiding, institutional
factors sufficiently into account, the "social stratification" and "power
because each emphasizes that, while coalition-forming may be universal, not all coalitions are equivalent. For certain types of issues
(without accepting Mills's argument that these are all the "key" issues),
2David Truman's rather weak and diffuse "potential interest group" is a doff of
the hat in this direction, but this concept is so non-directive and non-observable as to
be disregarded even by its creator.
3 The best critiques and analyses of all the various currents of thought are found
in Nelson W. Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory (New Haven i963);
Daniel Bell, "The Power Elite-Revisited," American journal of Sociology, LXIV
(November 1958), 238-50; Robert A. Dahl, "Critique of the Ruling Elite Model,"
American Political Science Review, LII (June 1958), 463-69; and Raymond Wolfinger,
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it seems clear that decisions are made by high public and private
"officials" in virtually a public opinion and interest-group opinion
vacuum. One does not have to go all the way with Mills and insist that
behind all apparent conflict there is an elite whose members all agree
less important than the others, which has not been self-consciously
employed since its creation in I935 because it was mistakenly taken as
a case of pluralism. I refer to E. E. Schattschneider's conclusions in
was stabilized toward the "command posts" (in this case, the House
Ways and Means Committee), not because the officials were above pressure groups, but because the pattern of access led to supportive relations
between pressure groups and officials. What may appear to one observer as evidence of a power elite appears to another as decentralized
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cases completely unrelated to the tariff and much more recent than
I930, we can find plenty of evidence to support this third or fourth5
approach to a "theory" of power and policy-making. But as a general
theory Schattschneider's conclusions would be no more satisfactory
than any one approach identified earlier.
The main trouble with all these approaches is that they do not
generate related propositions that can be tested by research and
experience. Moreover, the findings of studies based upon any one of
them are not cumulative. Finally, in the absence of logical relations
between the "theory" and the propositions, the "theory" becomes selfdirecting and self-supportive. This is why I have employed the term
"theory" only with grave reservations and quotation marks.
The pluralist approach has generated case-study after case-study that
"proves" the model with findings directed by the approach itself.
Issues are chosen for research because conflict made them public; group
influence is found because in public conflict groups participate whether
they are influential or not. Group influence can be attributed because
groups so often share in the definition of the issue and have taken
positions that are more or less directly congruent with the outcomes.
An indulged group was influential, and a deprived group was uninfluential; but that leaves no room for group irrelevancy.
The elitist approach is no less without a means of self-assessment.
If power distributions are defined as "inherently hierarchical,"' then a
case of coalition politics either represents non-exhaustive research or
concerns an issue that is not fundamental and so only involves the
"middle levels of power."' One need not look for theoretical weaknesses
in Schattschneider's approach because his interpretation was mistakenly
thrown in with the pluralists. This is most unfortunate, because if the
differences between Schattschneider's discoveries (especially his insights
eralizations to the particular policy in question should be noted here as a point central
to my later arguments.
5 There are four approaches here if the "social stratification" school is kept separate
from the "power elite" school. While both make the same kinds of errors, each leads
to different kinds of propositions. In some hands they are, of course, indistinguishable
and, for good reason, Polsby in Community Power and Political Theory treats the
two as one. Since the distinction, once made, is not important here, I will more or
less follow Polsby's lead.
6 Milton Gordon, quoted in Polsby, 103.
7 Cf. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York 1956), 245: ". . . the political
analyst is generally on the middle levels of power himself. He knows the top only
by gossip; the bottom, if at all, only by 'research.'" Thus, Mills continues, the professor and free-lance intellectual are "at home with the leaders of the middle level,
and . . . focus upon the middle levels and their balances because they are closer to
them."
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into a different type of coalition) and those of later case writers had
been recognized, a more sophisticated kind of ordered pluralism might
have resulted. This is coming close to the approach I will presently
propose.
for every type of participant and phase in the process, the authors are
in a position to deal as well with the substance of the communications,
perceptions of them by the recipients and, therefore, with some of the
vital aspects of influence. They have looked into the little black box of
political relationships among all the influence-seekers which the pluralists say contains the reality of influence and the elitists say doesn't really
exist anyhow. What they have found severely tests the assumptions of
both schools of thought. Without significant adjustments, the pluralist
framework (called by the authors the "pressure-group model") will be
able to encompass a great many of their propositions and findings only
with extreme difficulty. For example:
(i) There is no one-for-one nexus between the policies at stake and
interest-group activation (chap. 9). Protectionists were more highly
activated than anti-protectionists.
(2) The two "sides" of the controversy never met in a face-to-face
conflict with a settlement by compromise. In large part, the basis of
the protectionist coalition was a series of interests in individual tariff
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is an instrument of foreign policy and general regulation for international purposes, the anti-protectionists win; if the traditional defini-
kinds of coalitions (rather than "a politics of coalition" where all coalitions are equivalent in every way except size and value of resources). Each type of coalition is appropriate for certain types of issues and each has extreme significance for outcomes,
perhaps as much as cohesion and access. More on this presently.
10Again suggesting that a distinct kind of coalition is involved here, the authors
say: ". . . neither the interest of the New England textile manufacturers in supporting
oil imports nor that of the Eastern railroads in opposing these imports were in any
way self-evident. Offered the proper coalition, they both might well have been persuaded that their interest was in the opposite direction" (p. 398).
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their mail rather than to reflect the messages from the outside. Messages
from constituents and groups are so numerous and conflicting that
Congressmen have a maximum-choice situation. And, groups were
But for every single problem that the tariff decisions of a decade
pose for the pluralist model, they pose several for the elitist or the
stratification approaches:
(i) There was never, throughout the entire modern history of tariff
and foreign trade, any evidence that the top military played a role of
any sort. This is true despite the fact that the effectiveness of military
no contact at all had been made. Many pluralist writers before Bauer, Pool, and
Dexter have recognized the "service bureau" role, but rather than reexamine their
premises, they usually catalogue this as a "form of influence."
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and Charles Taft and George Ball for themselves and many others.
Their leading opposition, the Nation-wide Committee of Agriculture,
Industry and Labor on Export-Import Policy was composed of such
"middle levels of power" interest-group leaders as representatives of the
UMW, National Coal Association, Manufacturing Chemists' Association, and the Window Glass Cutters' League of America (chap. 3).
The CNTP and its official parent, the Randall Commission (Inland
Steel, etc.), had gone out of existence well before the i962 Trade Act
successes.
(6) The final outcome in the Trade Act of i962 was the direct result
of classic President-Congress interplay, involving many of the kinds of
compromises that the most vulgar pluralist view of American politics
would lead one to expect. Congressmen appeared to be more independent of constituents and groups than the pressure-group model
would allow. But, on the other hand, the degree to which the Executive
would be able to use trade as an instrument of international politics was
trade on the agenda for over ten years. Yet there is nothing in the
politics of trade decisions to support the notion that power follows
directly from selected, established institutional positions in industry or
military and public administration.
Bauer, Pool, and Dexter discovered that the pluralist model was of
little use to them. It seems equally clear that the elitist model would
have been of even less assistance. But this is because neither approach
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American Business and Public Policy, despite its richness as a casestudy in the politics of foreign trade, suffers the one debilitating handi-
cap of all case-studies, the problem of uniqueness. The case casts serious doubts on the perspectives employed in most case-studies because
of the rare comprehensiveness and exhaustiveness of its analysis, which
goes far beyond the storybook and paste-pot relations among participants usually contained in case-studies. But still, how are we to know
the extent to which the patterns the authors discover apply to all cases?
How are we to know at least toward what class of cases we can generalize ? The authors have too little to say about this. The subtitle of the
12 Aaron Wildavsky, Dixon-Yates: A Study in Power Politics (New Haven i962),
3II.
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say obtains only for this class of cases. However, at one point in the
book they argue that the case belongs to a much larger class, a class
which probably includes all domestic decisions except "some really
new and unexpected issue" (p. 46i): "So, on the whole, our case
seems to us typical of any issue having economic implications for a
number of industries and where, through a historical process, institutional alignments and expectations have been established" (pp. 4606i). On the other hand, one cannot be entirely sure how inclusive a
category the authors had in mind, for at another point they say:
that the broad-gauged theories of politics are not related, perhaps are
not relatable, to observable cases. In general, American political science
seems to be subject to a continuing fission of theory and research, in
13 "Inter alia, the transactional analysis here employed makes the concept of 'power'
and 'pressure' in the ordinary political-science sense of the terms somewhat more
difficult to employ; Arthur F. Bentley himself pointed out to one of us in 1936 that
he had long since abandoned these notions as not useful for systematic analysis"
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which the empiricist is not sufficiently mindful of his role as systembuilder and the system-builder is not sufficiently mindful (if at all)
of the role that theory is supposed to play. What is needed is a basis for
cumulating, comparing, and contrasting diverse findings. Such a
framework or interpretative scheme would bring the diverse cases
and findings into a more consistent relation to each other and would
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sive type of national domestic policy from I789 until virtually i890.
Agitation for regulatory and redistributive policies began at about
the same time, but regulation had become an established fact before
any headway at all was made in redistribution."7
These categories are not mere contrivances for purposes of simplification. They are meant to correspond to real phenomena-so much
so that the major hypotheses of the scheme follow directly from the
categories and their definitions. Thus, these areas of policy or government activity constitute real arenas of power. Each arena tends to develop its own characteristic political structure, political process, elites,
17 Foreign policy, for which no appropriate "-tion" word has been found, is obviously
a fourth category. It is not dealt with here for two reasons. First, it overly extends the
analysis. Second, and of greater importance, it is in many ways not part of the same
universe, because in foreign policy-making America is only a subsystem. Winston
Churchill, among other foreigners, has consistently participated in our foreign policy
decisions. Of course, those aspects of foreign and military policy that have direct domestic implications are included in my scheme.
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than they receive in services. Or, all may be thought regulatory because, in the long run, a governmental decision on the use of resources
can only displace a private decision about the same resource or at least
reduce private alternatives about the resource. But politics works in
the short run, and in the short run certain kinds of government decisions can be made without regard to limited resources. Policies of
this kind are called "distributive," a term first coined for nineteenthcentury land policies, but easily extended to include most contemporary public land and resource policies; rivers and harbors ("pork
barrel") programs; defense procurement and R & D; labor, business,
and agricultural "clientele" services; and the traditional tariff. Distributive policies are characterized by the ease with which they can
be disaggregated and dispensed unit by small unit, each unit more
or less in isolation from other units and from any general rule. "Patronage" in the fullest meaning of the word can be taken as a synonym
for "distributive." These are policies that are virtually not policies at
all but are highly individualized decisions that only by accumulation
can be called a policy. They are policies in which the indulged and
the deprived, the loser and the recipient, need never come into direct
confrontation. Indeed, in many instances of distributive policy, the deprived cannot as a class be identified, because the most influential
among them can be accommodated by further disaggregation of the
stakes.
(2) Regulatory policies are also specific and individual in their
impact, but they are not capable of the almost infinite amount of disaggregation typical of distributive policies. Although the laws are
stated in general terms ("Arrange the transportation system artistically." "Thou shalt not show favoritism in pricing."), the impact of
regulatory decisions is clearly one of directly raising costs and/or reducing or expanding the alternatives of private individuals ("Get off
the grass!" "Produce kosher if you advertise kosher!"). Regulatory
policies are distinguishable from distributive in that in the short run
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dulged and who deprived. Not all applicants for a single television
channel or an overseas air route can be propitiated. Enforcement of
an unfair labor practice on the part of management weakens management in its dealings with labor. So, while implementation is firm-byfirm and case-by-case, policies cannot be disaggregated to the level of
the individual or the single firm (as in distribution), because individual decisions must be made by application of a general rule and therefore become interrelated within the broader standards of law. Decisions cumulate among all individuals affected by the law in roughly
the same way. Since the most stable lines of perceived common impact
are the basic sectors of the economy, regulatory decisions are cumulative largely along sectoral lines; regulatory policies are usually disaggregable only down to the sector level.'8
They are, crudely speaking, haves and have-nots, bigness and smallness, bourgeoisie and proletariat. The aim involved is not use of property but property itself, not equal treatment but equal possession, not
behavior but being. The fact that our income tax is in reality only
mildly redistributive does not alter the fact of the aims and the stakes
involved in income tax policies. The same goes for our various "welfare state" programs, which are redistributive only for those who entered retirement or unemployment rolls without having contributed
at all. The nature of a redistributive issue is not determined by the
outcome of a battle over how redistributive a policy is going to be.
Expectations about what it can be, what it threatens to be, are determinative.
ARENAS OF POWER
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it is proper for each to seek duties [indulgences] for himself but improper and unfair to oppose duties [indulgences] sought by others."21
In the area of rivers and harbors, references are made to "pork barrel"
and "log-rolling," but these colloquialisms have not been taken sufficiently seriously. A log-rolling coalition is not one forged of conflict, compromise, and tangential interest but, on the contrary, one
composed of members who have absolutely nothing in common; and
this is possible because the "pork barrel" is a container for unrelated
items. This is the typical form of relationship in the distributive arena.
The structure of these log-rolling relationships leads typically, though
not always, to Congress; and the structure is relatively stable because
all who have access of any sort usually support whoever are the leaders.
And there tend to be "elites" of a peculiar sort in the Congressional
committees whose jurisdictions include the subject-matter in question.
Until recently, for instance, on tariff matters the House Ways and
Means Committee was virtually the government. Much the same can
be said for Public Works on rivers and harbors.22 It is a broker leadership, but "policy" is best understood as cooptation rather than conflict
and compromise.
Bauer, Pool, and Dexter are astonished to discover trade associations and other groups suffering from lack of funds and support. They
see as paradoxical the fact that "protectionism" as a policy could win out
time after time even when a majority of businessmen and Congressmen
seemed on principle to favor freer trade. (There are instances of this run-
ning clear back to the i890's.) They see as purposive Congress's "giving
up" tariff-making because the "power to dole out favors is not worth the
price of having to beat off and placate the insistent pleas of petitioners"
(p. 37). Astonishment and the detection of paradox and a "Congressional group mind" are evidences of an insufficiently broad point of
21 Ibid., I35-36.
22 The stable, intimate interlocking of Congressional committeemen and their support groups in the Rivers and Harbors Congress and the Corps of Engineers has been
made famous by Arthur Maass; see Muddy Waters: The Army Engineers and the
Nation's Rivers (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), and especially "Congress and Water Resources," American Political Science Review, XLIV (September 1950), 576-92, reprinted
in my reader, Legislative Politics USA (Boston I962). Cited widely as an example of
interest-group strategy and access, this case has not until now, as far as I know, been
given its proper significance. That significance comes clear within my scheme. The
pattern approaches that of the tariff but not of regulatory situations.
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view. There are good and theoretically interesting reasons for each of
these phenomena. Distributive issues individualize conflict and provide
the basis for highly stable coalitions that are virtually irrelevant to the
larger policy outcomes; thousands of obscure decisions are merely
accumulated into a "policy" of protection or of natural-resources development or of defense subcontracting. And Congress did not "give
up" the tariff; as the tariff became a matter of regulation (see below),
committee elites lost their power to contain the participants because
obscure decisions became interrelated, therefore less obscure, and more
controversy became built in and unavoidable.23
(2) The regulatory arena could hardly be better identified than in
the thousands of pages written for the whole polity by the pluralists.
But, unfortunately, some translation is necessary to accommodate
pluralism to its more limited universe. The regulatory arena appears
to be composed of a multiplicity of groups organized around tangential
relations or David Truman's "shared attitudes." Within this narrower
tion of interests around the 1946 Employment Act (redistribution, even if a peculiar
"law"). The typical log-rolling situation he identifies with rivers and harbors appropriations (distribution). The difference between us is that my scheme considers
these patterns of coalition as revealing fundamental political relations that are limited
to certain types of issues, while Truman implies that they are two strategies in all
inventory of strategies more or less appropriate to any issue.
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membership was a condition for cohesion: ". . . unanimity (or cohesion) is maintained by the use of multiple group memberships for
purposes that might produce conflict within a single given group"
(p. 332n). They observed that overlapping is a form of specialization
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tends to pass from administrative agencies and Congressional committees to Congress, the place where uncertainties in the policy process
The most interesting thing about the work of Bauer, Pool, and
Dexter, from the standpoint of my scheme, is that they studied a policy
that was undergoing a transition from distribution to regulation. It is,
I feel, for this reason that they find some support for the pressure-group
model but not enough to convince them of its utility. But it is this very
transition that makes their case-study so interesting. Beginning with
reciprocity in the I930'S, the tariff began to lose its capacity for infinite
disaggregation because it slowly underwent redefinition, moving away
from its purely domestic significance towards that of an instrument of
at almost any cost.) Second, until i962, the basic tariff law and
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schedules were still contained in the Smoot-Hawley Act. This act was
amended by Reciprocal Trade but only to the extent of allowing negotiated reductions rather than reductions based on comparative costs.
Until i962, tariff politics continued to be based on commodity-bycommodity transactions, and thus until then tariff coalitions could be
based upon individual firms (or even branches of large and diversified
firms) and log-rolling, unrelated interests. The escape clause and peril
point were maintained in the i950's so that transactions could be made
on individual items even within reciprocity. And the coalitions of
strange bedfellows continued: "Offered the proper coalition, they
both [New England textiles and Eastern railroads] might well have
been persuaded that their interest was in the opposite direction"
(p. 398).
even more clearly than the few already observed in the group structure.
Out of a committee (House Ways and Means) elite, we can see the
emergence of Congress in a pluralist setting. Even as early as I954-I955,
the compromises eventually ratified by Congress were worked out, not
in committee through direct cooptation of interests, but in the Randall
Commission, a collection of the major interests in conflict (p. 47).
Those issues that could not be thrashed out through the "group process"
also could not be thrashed out in committee but had to pass on to
Congress and the floor. After I954 the battle centered on major
categories of goods (even to the extent of a textile management-union
entente) and the battle took place more or less openly on the floor
(e.g., pp. 6o, 62, and 67). The weakening of the Ways and Means
Committee as the tariff elite is seen in the fact that in i955 Chairman
Cooper was unable to push a closed rule through. The Rules Committee, "in line with tradition," granted a closed rule but the House
voted it down 207-I78 (p. 63).25 Bauer, Pool, and Dexter saw this as a
victory for protectionism, but it is also evidence of the emerging
House, in forty-two years in my memory, has a bill of this kind and character been
considered except under a closed rule . . ." (p. 64, emphasis added). It was on the
following morning that Rayburn expressed his now-famous warning to the frosh: "If
you want to get along, go along" (p. 64).
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Tariff Commission rulings under the escape clause be final except where
the President finds the national security to be involved-was voted
down 206-i99 (pp. 64-65). After that, right up to i962, it was clear that
tariff decisions would not be made piecemeal. Tariff became a regulatory policy in i962; all that remains of distributive politics now are
quotas and subsidies for producers of specific commodities injured by
general tariff reductions.
(3) If Bauer, Pool, and Dexter had chosen a line of cases from the
redistributive arena for their intensive analysis, most assuredly they
would have found themselves in an altogether different universe,
proposing different generalizations, expressing different doubts. The
same would have been true of Schattschneider and of the pluralist
students of regulatory cases. Compared particularly with the regulatory
area, very few case-studies of redistributive decisions have ever been
published. This in itself is a significant datum-which Mills attributes
I946).
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of the debate was contained within the CES and its committees until a
mature bill emerged. Since not all of the major issues had been settled
in the CES's bill, its members turned to Congress with far from a
common front. But the role of Congress was still not what would have
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groups" (p. 1154). And when the tax issues "are at a major political
level, as are tax rates or personal exemptions, then pressure groups,
labor organizations, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the others, become concerned" (p.
ii66). The "average congressman does not basically believe in the
present income tax in the upper brackets" (p. ii50), but rather than
touch the principle he deals in "special hardship" and "penalizing" and
waits for decisions on principle to come from abroad. Amidst the I954I955 tax controversies, for example, Ways and Means members decided
to allow each member one bill to be favorably reported if the bill met
with unanimous agreement (p. II57).
Issues that involve28 redistribution cut closer than any others along
class lines and activate interests in what are roughly class terms. If
there is ever any cohesion within the peak associations, it occurs on
redistributive issues, and their rhetoric suggests that they occupy themselves most of the time with these.29 In a ten-year period just before and
after, but not including, the war years, the Manufacturers' Association
of Connecticut, for example, expressed itself overwhelmingly more
involving basic relations between bourgeoisie and proletariat outnumbered expressions on regulation of business practices by 870 to 418,
despite the larger number of issues in the latter category.3' This pattern
goes contrary to the one observed by Bauer, Pool, and Dexter in tariff
politics, where they discovered, much to their surprise, that self-interest
did not activate both "sides" equally. Rather, they found, the con28 "Involve" may appear to be a weasel word, but it is used advisedly. As I argued
earlier when defining redistribution, it is not the actual outcomes but the expectations
as to what the outcomes can be that shape the issues and determine their politics. One
of the important strategies in any controversial issue is to attempt to define it in redistributive terms in order to broaden the base of opposition or support.
29 In personal conversations, Andrew Biemiller of AFL-CIO has observed that this
is true even of his group. He estimates that perhaps from 8o to go per cent of their
formal policy expressions deal with welfare and general rights of collective bargaining
and that only occasionally does the central board touch specific regulatory issues.
31 Note also in the table the fairly drastic contrast in the proportion of references
that expressed approval. Similarly drastic differences are revealed in Lane's figures on
the reasons given for expressing disapproval. On those issues I call redistributive, the
overwhelmingly most important reason is "coerciveness." In contrast, this reason was
given for about io per cent of general trade regulation and anti-trust references, 3 per
cent of the basing-point negative references, and not once when Miller-Tydings and
Robinson-Patman were denounced. For regulatory issues, the reason for disapproval
given most frequently was that the policy was confused and that it failed to achieve its
purposes. And there were equally high percentages of residual or "other" responses,
suggesting a widespread lack of agreement as to the very meaning of the policy.
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4.
Trade
practices
119
13.8
7.
Anti-trust
Basing
72
points
26.4
55
20.0
more often and intensely than did the general, ideological position of
the liberal-traders (pp. I92-93). This was true in tariff, as they say,
because there the "structure of the communications system favored the
propagation of particular demands" (p. i9i). But there is also a structure of communications favoring generalized and ideological demands;
this structure consists of the peak associations (which were seen as
ineffective in tariffs-pp. 334, 335-36, 337-38, and 340); and it is highly
effective when the issues are generalizable. This is the case consistently
for redistributive issues, almost never for distributive issues, and only
seldom for regulatory issues.
As the pluralists would argue, there will be a vast array of organized
interests for any item on the policy agenda. But the relations among
the interests and between them and government vary, and the nature
of and conditions for this variation are what our political analyses
should be concerned with. Let us say, in brief, that on Monday night
the big associations meet in agreement and considerable cohesion on
"the problem of government," the income tax, the Welfare State. On
Tuesday, facing regulatory issues, the big associations break up into
their constituent trade and other specialized groups, each prepared to
deal with special problems in its own special ways, usually along
subject-matter lines. On Wednesday night still another fission takes
place as the pork barrel and the other forms of subsidy and policy
patronage come under consideration. The parent groups and "catalytic
groups" still exist, but by Wednesday night they have little identity. As
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Bauer, Pool, and Dexter would say, they have preserved their unanimity
through overlapping memberships. They gain identity to the extent that
they can define the issues in redistributive terms. And when interests in
issues are more salient in sectoral or geographic or individual terms,
the common or generalized factor will be lost in abstractness and
diffuseness. This is what happened to the liberal trade groups in the
tariff battles of the i950's, when "the protectionist position was more
firmly grounded in direct business considerations and . . . the liberaltrade position fitted better with the ideology of the times.. ." (p. I50).
Where the peak associations, led by elements of Mr. Mills's power
elite, have reality, their resources and access are bound to affect power
relations. Owing to their stability and the impasse (or equilibrium) in
relations among broad classes of the entire society, the political structure
of the redistributive arena seems to be highly stabilized, virtually
institutionalized. Its stability, unlike that of the distributive arena,
derives from shared interests. But in contrast to the regulatory arena,
these shared interests are sufficiently stable and clear and consistent to
provide the foundation for ideologies. Table 2 summarizes the hypothesized differences in political relationships drawn above.
Many of the other distinctive characteristics of this arena are related
to, perhaps follow from, the special role of the peak associations. The
cohesion of peak associations means that the special differences among
related but competing groups are likely to be settled long before the
policies reach the governmental agenda. In many respects the upperclass directors perform the functions in the redistributive arena that
are performed by Congressional committees in the distributive arena
and by committees and Congress in the regulatory arena. But the differences are crucial. In distributive policies there are as many "sides"
as there are tariff items, bridges and dams to be built, parcels of public
land to be given away or leased, and so on. And there are probably as
many elites as there are Congressional committees and subcommittees
which have jurisdiction over distributive policies. In redistribution,
there will never be more than two sides and the sides are clear, stable,
and consistent. Negotiation is possible, but only for the purpose of
strengthening or softening the impact of redistribution. And there is
probably one elite for each side. The elites do not correspond directly
to bourgeoisie and proletariat; they are better understood under Wallace Sayre's designation of "money-providing" and "service-demanding" groups. Nonetheless, the basis for coalition is broad, and it centers
around those individuals most respected and best known for worth
and wealth. If the top leaders did not know each other and develop
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