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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes the Senate to support or oppose a bill as per their interest. In case their purpose in not served in the
legislative world, they shift their attention to the world of administration where every interest
“attempts to ‘colonise’ the government in a number of ways: by influencing administrators, by offering
them important jobs in their own organisations, by representing them with facts and figures that
appear to be convincing.”
Critical Appreciation: However, the political behaviour of the interest groups in France is much
different from that of their Anglo-American counterparts in view of the fact that here pressure groups,
like political parties, frequently take to the course of agitation and violence in which the part of the
communists is too obvious. The multi-party system of this country with the tradition of violent
revolutions is responsible for making the position of institutional and anomic groups more important
than that of the situation obtaining in Britain. The Communist Party has its ‘supporters’ in the trade
union organisations and certain institutional groups (like the Catholic Church) have their colonies in
the political parties with the result that the parties and pressure groups interpenetrate each other.
Such a study of the existence and articulation of interest organisations in the politics of France shows
that here political pluralism has a very fragmented character. Not the existence of so many political
parties and groups but the state of isolation and the process of disintegration engage our attention.
The differences between different groups, even among the important figures of the same group, have
been so deep that they have not been able to act in unison. Quite often the groups have failed to
generate a common strategy with the result that no definite rule of political behaviour can be laid
down after making a study of pressure group politics in this country. One is struck with the fact that
even the groups of the workers and intellectuals have sharp differences so much so that one may
suggest the existence of an isolative political culture in this country. Though at times of great national
crisis, unity has been achieved around the ‘myth of France’, yet the content of national symbols “has
always given rise to disagreement—the interpretations of Jaures and Maurras, Renan and Daudet,
being obviously incompatible. The real France has never been able to produce a legal France in its
image.
It is due to this that while the ‘bourgeois’ interests have been in a position of advantage due to the
practical application of their secret lobbying tactics, the ‘proletarian’ organisations have suffered.
The political ineffectiveness of the labour organisation stems from a relatively late development of an
organised working class movement and also from the tendency of French trade unionists to divide
themselves between rivals, if not warring ideological camps. Moreover, the failure of the movement
of syndicalism had its own impact on the working class movement of France. A large section of the
workers felt disillusioned when it found that the official policy of the Confederation (CGS) was wrong
as it was based on the belief that working class victories could be won not piecemeal through
parliamentary means but, in one major push, through the general strike. Moreover, a section of the
ultra-leftists was taken aback when it found that most of the workers’ unions took a pro-bourgeois
stand during the days of the First World War. The result was that the ultra-leftists (communists)
formed an organisation (CGTU) that was disbanded in 1936 when the Popular Front came into being
and a large section of the ‘leftists’ rejoined the CGT dominated mostly by the socialists.
The state of disintegration is still plaguing the politics of pressure groups to the extent that neither
political parties nor pressure groups have been able to form an autonomous sub-system of their own.
There is much of anomism and Poujadism in the political behaviour of various interest groups that
places the stasiological politics of France in a category different from its Anglo-American counterparts.
In fact, the significance of many institutional and anomic interest groups “is directly related to the
uneven effectiveness of associational interest groups, the absence of any effectively aggregative party
system, and its fragmented or isolative political culture. Parties and interest groups in France do not
constitute differentiated, autonomous political subsystems. They interpenetrate one another.”
National People’s Congress and its Standing Committee

Like its predecessor, the new Constitution declares the NPC as the ‘highest organ of State power’.
During its absence its Standing Committee has highest legislative authority. Its term is fixed at five
years. As a unicameral Parliament, it consists of one house having Deputies elected by the provinces,

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