Page 265 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes between an individual’s political behaviour and group action. Thus, there “is the paradoxical situation
that the most popular theory is one of individualism as the correct basis of political action, whereas
actual political practice depends very much upon group intervention”.
The same degree of freedom of action for the interplay of pressure groups is not allowed in a
parliamentary system of the British model where political parties on the basis of their numerical
strength form either the Government or the Opposition and run their organisation on the basis of
strict discipline. Besides, the party commanding majority in the popular chamber forms the government
and thereby implements its policy and programme as given in the party manifesto or announced at
the platform. And yet it does not imply that there are no pressure groups in Britain. Sir Winston
Churchill once frankly admitted: “We are not supposed to be an assembly of gentlemen who have no
interests of any kind. That is ridiculous. That might happen in Heaven, but not happily here”.
The main point of difference between the American and British patterns of government is that in
Britain, unlike the United States, the “pork-barrel is kept locked up in 10, Downing Street”. The
machinery of legislative process at the Westminster is propelled not by the force of pressure groups
emerging in the shape of open or clandestine lobbying but by the decision-making agency of the
executive (cabinet) which formulates the policy of national administration and makes the Parliament
and the entire administration run accordingly. It is a different thing that the party in power
accommodates the interests of a particular group in its programme and thereby frustrates the
advantages of others, as instead of legislation “depending upon pressure groups, it depends upon
whether the Government (and the civil servants) want to introduce it, and however much the
Government finds it convenient to consult with interests affected, it insists that the policy shall be
determined by itself alone”.
In the British political system the functions of the interest groups and political parties “are sharply
differentiated. Interest groups articulate political demands in the society, seek support for these
demands among other groups by advocacy and bargaining, and attempt to transform these demands
into authoritative public policy by influencing the choice of political personnel, and the various
processes of public policy-making and enforcement. Political parties tend to be free of ideological
rigidity, and are aggregative, i.e., seek to form the largest possible interest group coalitions by offering
acceptable choices of political personnel and public policy. Both interest group systems and the party
systems are differentiated, bureaucratised and autonomous. Each unit in the party and interest group
system comes into the ‘market’, so to speak, with an adjusting bargaining ethos. Furthermore, the
party system stands between the interest group system and the authoritative policy-making agencies
and screens them from the particularistic and disintegrative impact of special interests. The party
system aggregates interests and transforms them into a relatively small number of alternative general
policies. Thus, this set of relationships between the party system and the interest group system enables
choice among general policies to take place in the cabinet and parliament, and assures that the
bureaucracy will tend to function as a neutral instrument of the political agencies”.
Pressure groups play a very powerful, and also a very irresponsible role in France not because her
political system is quasi-parliamentary but because French people have a different temperament and
their sectional interests “tend to take precedence over the national interest”. It is, in other words,
owing to the fact that this country has never accepted the full “mplications of parliamentarism like
the people of Britain but retained a peculiar situation of the predominant position of the National
Assembly before the de Gaulle Constitution of 1958 and of the President after the termination of the
Fourth Republic. However, the existence and articulation of pressure groups in France has a very
striking feature in that while they are ‘solidly organised’, they “are also divided that they often fail to
generate a common strategy and action”.
The multi-party system of France with traditions of violent revolutions is responsible for making the
position of institutional and anomic groups more important than that obtaining in Britain. The
Communist Party has its groups in the trade union organisations and certain institutional groups
(like the Catholic Church) have their colonies in the political parties (like CFTC) with the result that
the parties and pressure groups interpenetrate each other. In fact, the significance of institutional and
anomic interest groups “is directly related to the uneven effectiveness of associational interest groups,
the absence of an effectively aggregative party system, and its fragmented or isolative political culture.

260 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY