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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes elected bodies; recommends appointment of Prime Minister and other ministers etc. Generally it
formulates all policies which are implemented by the government. Therefore it is correctly said that
in China it is the Communist Party which rules.
13.4 Interest Groups or Pressure Group in USA, UK, Russia and France

Interest Groups or Pressure Groups in USA

A novel feature of the American political system should be discovered not in the operation of a
representative democracy through political parties taking part in the biennial elections of the Congress
and the quadrennial elections of the President but in the role of several interest organisations operating
at every level through which the people sharing common economic or social characteristics or policy
objectives struggle for the protection and promotion of their specific interests. There is no dearth of
such groups, though only some of them may be taken for the purpose of our study as they play their
part in the determination of an official policy or in the implementation of some governmental law or
order.
General Characteristics: In the United States, there are literally thousands of pressure groups of
varying size, structure, functions and influence ranging from the National Association of Manufactures
(NAM) and American Federation of Labour - Congress of Industrial Organisation (AFL-CIO),
American Medical Association, American Bar Association, American Civil Liberties Union etc. to
local and social or cultural groups like Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Urban League.
Our concern, in the main, is with those principal organisations which seek to affect public policy. The
salient features of their operation may be put as under:
1. Pressure groups in the United States are numerous; they are also autonomous to a very great
extent. The reason for this lies in America’s being a vast democratic country with a federal
system and having a huge population dedicated to the ideals of mammon-worship and
pragmatism. The party system is too weak to keep the numerous groups in order. The result is
that organised groups feel nothing like committed to a particular political party. Not only this,
the role of groups is so potential that it determines the behaviour of the political parties in most
of the cases and not vice versa.
2. The constitutional system of the United States is such that the pressure groups find ample
scope for making their influence felt. There is separation of powers coupled with the system of
checks and balances with the result that the decision of one department may be checked by
another. Interest groups thus fix their attention at all centres of decision-making, including its
implementation. American political system stands on the principle of separation of powers
whereby the will of the President cannot become a law in every case and that the federal judiciary
may strike down any order of the President or any law of the Congress on the ground of its
being ultra vires of the Constitution. Mostly the groups have their eyes fixed on the President as
he is the virtual ruler of the country, but when they fear some frustration, they make their
potential articulation through the legislative bodies with the result that there is pressure and
cross-pressure upon the government. Sometimes, lobbying assumes a very serious proportion
to act as a counterblast to the authority of the President as a result of which there occurs, what
is called, the deadlock of democracy.
3. What makes the subject of American pressure groups a matter of interesting study as well as an
object of denunciation is their technique of lobbying. It means exercising pressure on public
officials in order to have the purpose served, though in a strict sense its application is taken as
confined to persuade and influence the members of the Congress who are concerned with the
business of legislation. In actual practice, the scope of lobbying has now covered almost every
nook and corner of the American administration whether at the national, or state, or local level.
Not only this, sometimes the lobbyists go the the final extent of bearing their weight upon the
public officials by all means, whether proper or improper, that becomes ‘grass-roots lobbying’.
Though one may find glimpses of the use of this technique even in other countries like Britain
and France, it may be said that the magnitude of lobbying in the United States has no parallel in

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