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Unit 13: Political Parties

it is to be in a position to negotiate. The secrecy in decision-making is to a large extent inevitable.” Notes
There should be no doubt that pressure groups influence government policy and, in turn, the
government influences pressure group activity with limited amounts of coercion and no bribery.
Each needs the other. For this reason, it shall be highly imprudent to suggest measures that may
outlaw the operation of organized groups. As factions are bound to play their part in the democratic
process, so is the case with interest groups. As in many relationships, close ties may at times produce
harmony and at times strain. The process of continuous contract and bargaining is dialectical exchange
of influence, resulting in policies that are often the product of the dialectic, and not specifically of one
or the other group. As a matter of fact, so close has been the relationship between the political parties
and pressure groups on the one side and government activity and political process of the country on
the other that the two can not be extricated. It is due to this that there is a two-way traffic between
those who really rule and those whose interest are at stake because of their ruling. The merit of the
whole phenomenon is that a sort of workable.
Pressure Groups or Interest Group in Russia

In the Soviet Union several interest groups (as Komsomols, Octoberists, Pioneers, Writers’ Union
etc.) existed which were subordinate to the Communist Party and which served as a conduit for its
ideological influence and political control. But now the conditions have basically changed. The workers,
the employees and the professionals have formed their unions and the functioning of those associations
has changed which existed under the rule of the Communist Party in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist
periods. The Federation of Independent Trade Unions FITU) is no longer an arm of the Communist
Party. The workers have formed their trade unions at the regional and local levels. The Writers’
Union and the Cinematographers’ Union are the examples of professional groups. The Women
Movement though registered under the election law, is not a party as such, it is an interest group of
the women of Russia. The notable point is that now dissident and protest movements often occur
here. Andrei Sakharov, who was thrown behind the bars, was freed in 1986 and then he freely
participated in the reform process till his death three years after. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was
exiled from the country, came back in 1994. It shows that in the Russian Federation led by Yeltsin, the
people “increasingly refused to allow Communist Party organisations to define their interests for
them, but in stead expressed their interests for themselves”.
In the end, we may say that the political system of the Russian Federation is no longer totalitarian as
it was in the Soviet Union. A liberal-democratic order replaced the communist order established by
Lenin and strengthened by his successors like Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
Gorbacho v read the pulse of the time and he started the process of change that saw its consolidation
at the hands of Yeltsin. It had fonr integrated mplications-liberalisation and then attempted
democratisation of the political system, dismantling State dominance of the economy a search for
new forms of collective identity to replace those provided by the old commnnist ideology, and process
of economic integration into the world of states and exposure to ideas and goods from the western
world.”

Pressure Groups or Interest Groups in France
A study of the role of pressure groups in the political system of France has an importance of its own
despite the fact that here the term ‘interest organisation’ has for a long time been used in a pejorative
sense. Formerly the term had essentially moral implications as the French people differentiated between
altruistic groups and those working to further their own personal ends. They designated the latter as
interest groups and placed those working towards the general welfare in another category. However,
this distinction failed to survive under the weight of changing conditions of politics. The traditional
approach broke down after the development of modern political science in France that witnessed the
devaluation of Rousseau’s general will as well as other democratic myths with the result that today
the leading political scholars of this discipline identify interest groups on none other than the criterion
of whether they succeed or fail to establish compatibility of their ends with those of the general
welfare.

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