Competing Viewpoints
Central to political science is the question of the relationship between the parts and the whole. An analogy is helpful. Think of your family. Each of you has needs and wants, and then there is what is good for the family. Perhaps the two go together. The adage, “If mama ain’t happy, then no one’s happy,” suggests one kind of harmony. But how often have you set aside your preference to help out someone else in your family? If a family shopping can only afford one carton of ice cream, which flavor is picked? A vote will leave some unhappy; a consensus may not be found. Of course, a parent might snap, “This isn’t a democracy!” and grab the cheapest flavor.
The same goes for a nation. In The Federalist Papers, Madison wrote about the challenge of reconciling the parts and the whole. Seeking to persuade the states to ratify the Constitution after the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, the parts that he worried about were not individual family members but factions, typically economic interest groups that seek government policies that benefit them and that may undermine the good of the whole. In Federalist #10, he wrote:
Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.
Madison argued that establishing a larger country with more centralized control checks the “mischief of faction.” Such a diversity of interests and groups prevents any one faction from abusing its influence. For example, farmers in one part of the country check the merchants elsewhere. The demands of the bankers balance those of their customers. Of course, the purpose of Federalist #10 was to help persuade states to ratify the US Constitution. Nonetheless, his theory of countervailing power is an original American contribution to understanding interest groups in a democracy: factions are likely to be selfish; in a free society, this selfishness cannot be abolished, and instead, the selfishness of one group can and should be checked by that of other groups.
Madison believed that groups are fundamentally good; in a free society, people should be able to organize and seek public policies that will improve themselves. Madison was a realist. He knew that these factions, as he called groups, could bias public policy in ways that might hurt other groups or the country. He hoped that the diversity of groups in a large country would limit the “mischief of faction.” Madison also relied on the institutional devices of having three branches of government that could check and balance each other as an additional way to address the problem of faction.
Fast forward to the twentieth century. Social scientists debate the same issue: is democracy captured by special interests? Cynics say yes. After all, you don’t have to be a Marxist to see the government as representing the interests of the wealthy. In 1956, sociologist C. Wright Mills argued in The Power Elite that a mix of wealthy people, celebrities, big corporations, the military, politicians, and bureaucrats ruled the country. These groups are not representative of most Americans, and they do not necessarily have the interests of most Americans in mind as they run America. Special interests steal American democracy from the people.
Political scientists responded to Mills by researching the relative influence of different interests. In Who Governs (1961), Robert Dahl argued that his investigation of city politics in New Haven, Connecticut, shows interest groups are not biased toward the wealthy. Many groups interact with one another, and public policy results from this bargaining. This argument becomes known as the theory of pluralism. So, the debate between elitists and pluralists continues, with elitists arguing that interest groups are more likely to represent wealthier people and pluralists claiming that groups are essentially a democratic device for everyone to organize.
One way to address this question is to institute rules that promote pluralism and discourage elitism. Pass regulations that channel interest groups toward the kind of politics that we prefer. In other words, just as Madison recommended “curing the mischief of faction” through federal design, Californians should likewise regulate interest groups to promote pluralism. The area that receives the most attention in this regard is campaign finance law.
