Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Organizational vs. ideological accounts of political struggle

Assuming that the politics is the determination of the actions of the state through the competing claims-making of various groups, including the personnel of the state as an organization, the following are two conceivable ways for one group to gain leverage over others.
  1. The capacity to impose costs on other groups through coordinated or uncoordinated collective action. The electorate can impose the straightforward cost on certain officials of refusing their re-election, but this is limited by the necessity of a rather extensive organization to put forward a viable alternative candidate. Outside of the ballot box, large groups can impose costs on the government or on powerful interests, which then make their own demands on the state, via protests that disrupt the normal functioning of social relations and especially the economy. This is the standard sociological account of social movements including the unions and others of the 1930s (epitomized by the wave of sit-down strikes) and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Notably, the more a particular interest group has more members but fewer resources as individuals, the more organization is crucial to mobilizing the one piece of leverage they do have: pure numbers. In contrast, interests with fewer members but much greater control of resources--the classic example being the owners and managers of capitalist enterprises--the more it is possible for relatively uncoordinated actions to impost large costs on policymakers, for instance, removal of support from key officials, or a general slowdown of investment activity, or even the threat thereof.
  2. The successful attempt to attach to one's program symbolic markers that, although their application is disputed, are generally accepted as valuable throughout a society. Political struggle is, thus, in substantial part a discursive struggle in which the stakes are such symbols as 'freedom,' 'the general interest,' 'fairness,' 'equal opportunity.' In this kind of account, the civil rights movement was ultimately successful because it was able to position itself as the continuation of political ideals of equal rights that are evident in the American political tradition going back at least to the Declaration of Independence, while their opponents were stick defending regressive racial hierarchy. In this way, the civil society groups that led the movement were in effect able to coerce national political leaders into bowing to their demands at the pain of being de facto opponents of formal political freedom and rights--a position that was obviously untenable in the American political culture. The challenge for this view is accounting for why one set of claims successfully achieves the desirable symbols, while others do not, and in particular that despite relatively rare exceptions, it is established powerful groups that are better able to achieve the labels they seek for their positions.
It is possible to effect a crude reconciliation of these two views by stipulating that the attachment of widely accepted symbolic value to a set of claims is a powerful force for the achievement of unity of purpose and commitment to action among an otherwise large and diffuse group, though it is one such factor among many others. This reconciliation has the virtue of explaining the importance of such discursive fights particularly when one group making claims is numbers-rich and resource-poor, since it is such a group that requires the collective organization and commitment that unifying symbols can help provide; indeed, the emergence of such groups as effective political forces often requires a process to discover shared interests and goals that can serve as foci for mobilization. On the other hand, the proposition that good arguments are not in themselves sufficient to mobilize a diffuse group suggests an explanation for the elite bias of claims to symbolic legitimacy: as much as unifying symbols are tools for collective action, the broader social recognition of the legitimacy of such symbolic claims is as much a result as a cause of successful mobilization.

This reconciliation perhaps would not satisfy a strong adherent to the second viewpoint, which is I think quite prominent in the practice of and commentary on politics. That is because it tends to reconcile the two views only by subordinating the 2nd to the 1st: collective action imposing costs on other groups is the sine qua non of political struggle, and discursive struggle is just one aspect of that, in part contributing to the mobilization of effective collective action and in part merely reflecting the "real" balance of political forces through the lens of journalism and public intellectual commentary within civil society.

The question, for me, is whether there really are cases where by dint of the discursive struggles of the public sphere, officials of the state were "forced" to adopt a policy symbolically marked by as following from a society's generally accepted values, in defiance of the relative capacity of interested groups to impose costs either directly or indirectly via other powerful interests. Of course, it is possible to imagine relatively "low stakes" questions, in which any decision by officials would elicit little positive support or resistance, but this too is a rather belittling suggestion for the role of discursive struggle. On the other hand, if in general both considerations point in the same direction--if that is, at the time at which the crucial decisions are made, the side with the greater practical capacity to impose costs also has won the most desirable symbols for it cause, and vice versa--it might perhaps be hard to distinguish between the two in practice.

Thus, much legislation and practically all regulations issued by state agencies (which often determines the details of how laws are actually enforced) are written with a great deal of input from individual corporations and business groups (or the think-tanks they fund). Such input is invariably phrased in terms of "general" concerns such as economic growth and the minimization of state burdens on private activity and, crucially, consumer choice. When this input plays a key role in the wording of laws and administrative rules, it could be said that officials "accept the arguments" in which the interests of those who make the arguments are presented as of general validity. It could also be said that the capacity of such groups to provide input to the legislative/regulatory process and to have that input accepted is a reflection of their power. The problem is that in the "normal" course of things, those groups don't particularly have to flex their power. It's true that they provide certain material benefits--contributions to politicians, junkets to all kinds of officials--but there is reason to doubt these are, taken individually, sufficient to "buy" officials' support. Nonetheless, it can be plausibly suggested that official deference to the input of businesses and their advocates follows a recognition, "on credit" as it were, that they could, if necessary, impose considerable costs on officials seen as uncooperative--for instance, although the material payments from powerful interests to individual elected officials are insufficient to account for specific policy positions, the threat of exclusion from the entire ecosystem of lobbyist "access" and political contributions would represent a cost that would potentially be politically fatal. Yet, this line of reasoning shades back into the idea that the claims of powerful groups are given "the benefit of the doubt," which does not obviate the need for those claims to be phrased in terms of at least prima facie general validity. If this is so, then it would suggest that attacks on that general validity, which seek to "uncover" its real basis in "partial" or "special" interests would have to be taken somewhat seriously by officials. Of course, "somewhat seriously" might amount to nothing more than a sentence in an official report to the effect that, "Concerns that policy a would be detrimental to public goods x, y, and z were found to be without merit." Symbolic challenge vanquished!

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