Page 271 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes • Friedrich says: “Where the interests are sharply divided, certain of these groups have proceeded
to take over the government and to revolutionise it in such a way as to suit their particular
needs and conception”.
• If politics means the reconciliation of interests by the role of group pressures, it becomes all the
more essential to examine the forces which have their impact upon the governmental process
by means of their potential articulation.
• A study of pressure groups after the study of party system makes a sister-analysis in view of
the fact that while the party system provides political representation, the network ot pressure
groups and their operation constitutes the functional part.
• Lobbying assumes a very serious, proportion to act as a counterblast to the authority of the
President and thus we often notice the cases of deadlock between the President and the Congress.
• Even if the legislature and executive are found to have a similar outlook going to the detriment
of the interest groups, they have a resort to judicial intervention to make that executive order or
legislative enactment null and void.
• 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”.
• 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.
• 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”.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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”.
• The existence and articulation of organised interest groups in every political system has been
dubbed as a sinister development, an exercise in partial as opposed to total representation and
the interplay of unprincipled and corrupt forces undermining the existence of what Rousseau
called ‘general will’.
• Various pressure groups operating in a political society are viewed with moral indignation and
alarm owing to their sinister penetration in the mechanism of modern representative system.
• Exponents of the group theory of politics and others subscribing to the school of modern
pluralism emphasise the fact that there is an organic relationship between the individual and
the groups owing to which the individuals “are the heirs of the head, while the groups are
limbs on which the body depends”.
• The real significance of pressure groups in a political society must be examined in the light of
two main considerations.
• The utility of pressure groups must be examined in the light of new approach to the meaning of
politics. Politics is a struggle for power creating conflicts and tensions and then discovering
and offering their solutions and adjustments.

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