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Unofficial Actors in The Policy Process
Unofficial Actors in The Policy Process
Unofficial Actors in The Policy Process
The policy studies scholars have divided the players in the policy process
into two main categories such as official and unofficial actors. Official actors
are those involved in public policy by virtue of their statutory or
constitutional responsibilities and have the power to make and enforce
policies. This does not preclude the possibility of these people being
influenced by others, like political party bosses or other interest/pressure
groups. The actors belonging to legislature, executive (including
bureaucracy), judiciary and regulatory agencies are clearly the official
actors.
Besides the official actors, there are many other groups and
organizations which do participate in the policy-making process. These
actors are called unofficial because their participation in the policy process
is not a function of their duties under the Constitution or the law. This is not
to say that these actors have no rights or standing to participate in the
process.
Rather, it means that their mode of participation in policy
formulation is not specified in law. On the other hand, it has evolved and
grown as the nation has evolved and grown. So the unofficial actors refer to
those who play a role in the policy process without any explicit legal
authority to participate, aside from the usual rights of participation in a
democracy. These groups include the interest/pressure groups of various
types, political parties, individual citizens, research organizations and think
tanks, and the mass media. They considerably influence policy formulation
without possessing legal authority to make binding policy decisions. While
the previous chapter focused on the role of official actors (legislature,
executive and judiciary) in policy formulation, the present chapter discusses
in detail the role of unofficial actors in the policy process.
Interest Groups
At the societal level, interest or pressure groups play a significant role in the
policy-making in many countries. While policy-making is a preserve of
the government, and particularly of the executive and bureaucracy,
the realities of modern politics enable groups formed specifically to
promote the interests or positions of specialized social groups to play
a significant role in the policy process. One of the most important
resources that differentiates such actors from others is the specific
knowledge they have at their disposal. The possession of specific
information that may be unavailable or less available to others
constitutes a very important advantage for them. The members of
specialized groups often know a great deal about their area of
concern. Since policy-making is a highly information-intensive
process, those with information may normally expect to play an
important role than the other. Politicians and bureaucrats often find
the information provided by interest groups indispensable for
performing their tasks. Government and opposition parties at times
curry favour with such groups to secure the information required for
effective policy-making or for attacking their opponents. Bureaucrats
similarly often need these groups help in developing and
implementing many policies (Baumgartner and Leech 1998).
The other resources possessed by interest or pressure groups are
organizational and political. The primary concern of a pressure group is to
influence policy in a particular manner. They may also supply the official
lawmakers with much technical information for and against a specific issue
and possible consequences of a policy proposal. Special interest groups
often make financial contributions to the campaign chests of sympathetic
political parties and politicians. They also campaign for and deliver votes to
sympathetic candidates who they think would support their cause in the
government. The main function of these groups is to express demands and
present alternatives for policy action. Often there are several groups with
conflicting desires on a particular policy issue, and policy makers are faced
with the problem of having to choose between conflicting demands.
However, interest groups political impacts on the formulation and
implementation of public policies vary considerably according to their
access to differing levels of organizational resources.
First, interest groups differ tremendously in terms of size of
membership. All other things being equal, larger groups can be expected to
be taken more seriously by the government. Well-organized and active
groups naturally have more influence than groups whose potential
membership is poorly organized and inarticulate.
Second, their propensity to associate with other similar groups also
works as a powerful influential factor. Some groups often form a peak
association consisting of representatives from other groups with similar
interests. A coherent peak association may be expected to be more
influential than those interest groups operating individually.
Third, some groups are well funded which enables them to hire
permanent specialized staff and influence parties and candidates during
elections.
Fourth, their influence and effectiveness also depends on other
resources like cohesiveness, leadership skills, social status and attitudes of
the policy makers on specific policy issues. The strength and legitimacy of
groups also differs from country to country, depending upon whether they
are democratic or dictatorial, developed or developing.
While the exact impact of interest group campaign expenditures on
government policy is contentious, there is no doubt that differences in
financial resources matter and that in democratic political systems the
information and power resources of interest groups make them key
members of policy subsystems. While this does not guarantee that their
interests will be accommodated, they are unlikely to be entirely ignored
except in rare circumstances when executive makes a high-level and
deliberate decision to go ahead with a policy despite opposition from
concerned groups.
Interest groups are found to be more numerous in the USA, UK and
India than they are in the Soviet Union or China. Given the plural character
of USA or Indian society, it is not surprising that pressure groups are many
and varied in number, interests, size, organization and style of operation. In
fact, the number of interest groups has rapidly expanded since the 1960s.
Today, while many groups are local and deal with local issues, many interest
groups and popular movements cannot be confined to small states or
communities. Rapid socio-economic and technological changes, coupled with
transportation and communications capabilities unimagined in the past, has
made it possible for large many groups to mobilize quickly on a regional or
national scale. With freedom of association and speech guaranteed by the
Constitution, neither US nor India place any legal burden in the path of
those who wish to mobilize and form an interest group. Grassroots
organizations form nearly daily to pursue myriad goals, such as halting the
construction of multipurpose dams across rivers to banning the screening of
some of the movies in the theatre halls. While mobilization and group
development are not greatly constrained in our political system, the mere
existence of a group does not necessary suggest that it will have any voice in
policy making. While some groups, particularly those representing
concentrated economic and business interests, have considerably more
power, other groups simply do not have it. Groups that represent powerful
or privileged interests are partly responsible for Americans suspicion of
interest groups or, as they are often called, special interest groups. In fact,
some groups call themselves public interest groups to signal that they view
their mission as a counterweight to these special interests.
Types of Interests Groups
There are many ways to categorize interest groups. One can distinguish
between an institutional interest group, whose members belong to a
particular institution, and a membership group, whose members have
economic security at stake, and the benefits are then more tangible. Public
interest groups, on the other hand, must appeal to other motivations than
economics. Most public interest groups make an appeal to peoples desire to
do good, augmenting it by material benefits like discounted nature tours,
glossy magazines, calendars, etc. These benefits seem trivial, but they help
to attract new members and promote group cohesion. Still, they are not as
powerful as economic inducements in promoting group unity.
Finally, it is important to note that some groups do not fit neatly into
the public interest-economic dichotomy. In particular, the United States
contains many religious and ideological groups that come together without
being based on economics or a broader public interest mission. Rather, their
mission is to promote their religious, moral, and ideological values among
their members and, sometimes, in the broader society. These groups range
from the mainstream churches to the more fundamentalist churches, and
from the politically moderate to the politically extreme on both ends of the
ideological spectrum. Such groups can become important players in the
policy process, at least briefly, during times of social upheaval and crisis or
when issues of morality and values are paramount.
As pointed out by both neo-pluralist and corporatist theorists, the
organization of business and labour is often seen as the most significant
factor in determining a states policy capabilities. This is because of the vital
role each plays in the production process, which is, in every society, a
fundamental activity that has effects far beyond the economy.
Business Associations
Among the various types of interest groups, business is generally the most
powerful, with an unmatched capacity to affect public policy. The increasing
globalization of production and financial activities, due to improvements in
modem means of communication and transportation and the gradual
removal of controls on international economic transactions, has contributed
tremendously to the power of capital in recent decades. It is possible for
investors and managers to respond, if they so wish, to any unwanted
government action by moving capital to another location. Although this
theoretical mobility is limited by a variety of factors including the
availability of suitable investment opportunities in other countries the
potential loss of employment and revenues is a threat with which the state
must contend in making decisions. Because of their potential to affect state
revenues negatively, capitalists both domestic as well as foreign have the
ability to punish the state for any action it might take of which they
disapprove (Hayes 1978).
The financial contributions that businesses make to political parties
also afford them an important resource for influencing policy-makers.
Elections can sometimes turn on relatively short-term issues and
personalities, which necessitate large budgets to influence voters through
extensive media advertising campaigns. In such situations, political parties
supported by contributions from business are in a better position to run such
campaigns and thus influence voting behaviour. This can lead political
strong trade unions, and the lowest in pluralist political systems such as the
United States and Canada, where it does not.
Political Parties
Political parties are an intermediating actor existing on the margins or
border between state and societal actors. They have a significant impact on
public policy, though in the modern era this usually has been only indirectly.
Though they are not directly represented in the policy subsystem, the party
to which they are affiliated may influence many of the actors in the
subsystem. Political parties tend to influence public policy indirectly,
primarily through their role in staffing the executive and, to a lesser degree,
the legislature. Indeed, once in office, it is not uncommon for party members
in government to ignore their official party platform while designing policies
(Thomson 2001).
In modem societies, political parties generally perform the function of
interest aggregation, i.e. they seek to convert the particular demands of
interest groups into general policy alternatives. The way in which parties
aggregate interests is affected by the number of parties. In predominantly
biparty systems such as the United States and Great Britain, the desire of
the parties to gain widespread electoral support will force both parties to
include in their policy proposals popular demands and avoid alienating the
most important social groups. In multiparty systems, on the other hand,
parties may do less aggregating and act as the representatives of fairly
narrow sets of interests as appears to be the case in France.
In India, there is a multiparty system, with half a dozen national
parties and regional parties of twice the number. Most of the national
parties have manifestos, which only differ in stress rather than in content
since their common desire is to extend their electoral base as wide as
possible. The regional parties, however, are more sectarian in their approach
since they desire mainly to woo a particular regional segment of the
population. In one-party systems like the Soviet Union and China, they are
the chief official framers of public policy. Generally, political parties have a
broader range of policy concerns than interest groups. Hence, they act
more as brokers than as advocates of particular interests in policy
formation.
In parliamentary democracies, the political party that has a majority
of votes in parliament forms the government, which is the chief official
policy maker. Needless to say, most of the governments make policies
according to the policy manifestos on which they have been elected to office.
In presidential systems like the United States, the fact that members of
Legislatures often vote in accordance with their party policy, the party that
controls the Congress exercises significant influence on policy matters.
The idea that political parties play a major role in the public policy
process, of course, stems from their undeniable influence on elections and
electoral outcomes in democratic states. While vote-seeking political parties
and candidates attempt to offer packages of policies they hope will appeal to
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the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. In India too, there
are a few policy think tanks like Centre for Policy Research, Observer
Research Foundation, etc. which have come up in recent years. Literally
hundreds of such institutes are active in the Western, developed, and
developing countries, some with broad policy mandates, and others that are
more limited in their purview such as the Canadian Environmental Law
Association (Lindquist, 1993; Abelson, 1996).
Many think tanks are
associated with a particular ideological position. While Brookings and Urban
Institute are center-left, the American Enterprise Institute is somewhat more
to the right, and Cato is libertarian. Others, like RAND, are more closely
associated with their methodological style. RAND uses very sophisticated
techniques in its analyses of a range of public issues.
Think-tanks target their research and recommendations to those
politicians who may be expected to be favourably disposed to the ideas
being espoused. They also seek originality in their ideas and, unlike the
researchers working in universities or the government, spend a great deal of
effort publicizing their findings. The need for a quick response to policy
issues and problems has forced many think-tanks to develop new product
lines. Short reports, journal articles, and policy briefs that can be quickly
read and digested have replaced book-length studies as the primary output
of many think-tanks. In addition, a premium has been placed on writing
articles and pieces for newspapers and making appearances on radio and
television programmes. This new brand of research and analysis is
dependent on the public policy food chain, which includes a range of
knowledge and policy-oriented institutions. Over the last few decades, much
of the work of think-tanks has been devoted to promoting economic
efficiency, since this has been an important preoccupation of the
governments in the industrialized world.
Mass Media
Last but not the least, media constitutes one of the important intermediating
actors active in the policy-making process. While some regard the role of the
mass media in the policy process as pivotal (Herman and Chomsky 1988,
Parenti 1986), others describe it as marginal (Kingdon 1984). There is no
denying that the mass media are crucial links between the state and society,
a position that allows for significant influence on the preferences of
government and society in regard to the identification of public problems
and their solutions. Yet, at the same time, like political parties, their direct
role in the various stages of the policy process is often sporadic and most
often quite marginal.
The role of the media in the policy process originates in the fact that
in reporting problems they function both as passive reporters and as active
analysts, as well as advocates of particular policy solutions. That is, news
programmes do not just report on a problem but often go to great lengths in
locating a problem not otherwise obvious, defining its nature and scope and
suggesting or implying the availability of potential solutions. The medias
role in agenda-setting is thus particularly significant. Media portrayal of
public problems and proposed solutions often conditions how they are
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