Page 266 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Unit 11: Pressure Groups

Parties and interest groups in France do not constitute differentiated, autonomous political subsystems. Notes
They interpenetrate one another”.
This type of articulation of interest groups has resulted in blurring the borderline between social and
political systems and accentuating the tendency of high incidence of anomic interest articulation,
what the French people call ‘poujadism’. Though a country of Europe having much of a parliamentary
system of government even under the Fifth Republic, the lobbies of France “are quite similar in their
methods of action to American lobbies. They give financial support to candidates; they place their
spokesmen in the legislature and in the Civil Service; they have their own journals and hand out
news releases in an attempt to away public opinion to their point of view; they often exact pledges
from the candidates they support and sponsor study committees in the legislatures to promote their
own interests”.
Almond in his paper on a comparative study of interest groups and the political process further puts:
“When parties control interest groups they may, and in France do, inhibit the capacity of interest
groups to formulate pragmatic specific demands; they impart a political-ideological content to interest
group activity. When interest groups control parties, they inhibit the capacity of the party to combine
specific interests into programmes with wider appeal. What reaches the legislative process from the
interest groups and through the political parties are, therefore, the ‘raw’ unaggregated demands of
specific interests, or the diffuse, uncompromising, or revolutionary and reactionary tendencies of the
Church and the movements of the right or left. Since no interest group is large enough to have a
majority, and the party system cannot aggregate different interests into a stable majority and a coherent
opposition, the electoral and legislative processes fail to provide alternative effective choices. The
result is a legislature penetrated by relatively narrow interests and uncompromising ideological
tendencies, a legislature which can be used as an arena for propaganda, or for the protection of
special interests; by veto or otherwise, but not for the effective and timely formulation and support of
large policy decisions. And without a strong legislature, special interests and ideological tendencies
penetrate the bureaucracy, and undermine its neutral, instrumental character”.
A comparison of British and American pressure groups creates the impression that they “only have
overweening power in parliamentary systems when the element of parliamentarism is not strong
enough to withstand them”. Now we take up the case of a country having totalitarian form of
government. It is wrong to assume that pressure groups have their operation only in a free and
democratic country. These groups do exist and operate even under a totalitarian system with the
difference that they “tend not to be independent: the embodiment of the goals of the system by
associations requires the creation of new associations which donot have any internal legitimacy and
thus rely on the political system to grow and to be maintained”. In contrast to the situation of a
democratic country, pressure groups in an authoritarian system are allowed a very circumscribed
role and serve merely “as instruments of the state for securing ends which are state-determined, or
they may become part of the facade of government for legitimising decisions”.
As a corollary to the above case, we may refer to a system of one party’s monolithic position in the
midst of weak and disarrayed opposition. Such a political system is quite different from the totalitarian
model for the obvious reason that here opposition is not forbidden. Such type of ‘dominant non-
authoritarian party systems’ are usually to be found where nationalist movements “have been
instrumental in attaining emancipation”. The line of difference between a totalitarian system and a
political system run by a single powerful political party lies in the fact that while pressure groups
operate in the former by means of intrigues, denunciation, passing the buck and other such oblique
methods, they operate in the latter without facing the onslaughts of purge and suppression and
discover their place within the structure of the party in power.
Finally, a reference should be made to the developing societies where pressure groups do exist though
in a rudimentary and poorly organised form. The techniques they often adopt are of a very crude
type. When a serious crisis comes, the military supervenes to finish the obtaining order and establish
its dictatorship by virtue of its coherent organisation, similarity of outlook and the capacity to organise
the coup. In such a society other interests “may be powerless to move because of their lack of
organisation and discipline; they will have to come to terms with the colonels, but will retain some
strength, since the colonels cannot run the state without at least some cooperation from them”.

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