Political Power of Weak Interests

* Book: Strength in Numbers: The Political Power of Weak Interests, by Gunnar Trumbull. Harvard University Press , 2012.

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"This book makes a bold and startling claim: diffuse interests, rather than concentrated interests, dominate the making of public policy in the advanced democracies. (Pepper D. Culpepper, European University Institute )"

Description

From the publisher:

"Many consumers feel powerless in the face of big industry’s interests. And the dominant view of economic regulators (influenced by Mancur Olson’s book The Logic of Collective Action, published in 1965) agrees with them. According to this view, diffuse interests like those of consumers are too difficult to organize and too weak to influence public policy, which is determined by the concentrated interests of industrial-strength players. Gunnar Trumbull makes the case that this view represents a misreading of both the historical record and the core logic of interest representation. Weak interests, he reveals, quite often emerge the victors in policy battles.

Based on a cross-national set of empirical case studies focused on the consumer, retail, credit, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors, Strength in Numbers develops an alternative model of interest representation. The central challenge in influencing public policy, Trumbull argues, is not organization but legitimation. How do diffuse consumer groups convince legislators that their aims are more legitimate than industry’s? By forging unlikely alliances among the main actors in the process: activists, industry, and regulators. Trumbull explains how these “legitimacy coalitions” form around narratives that tie their agenda to a broader public interest, such as expanded access to goods or protection against harm. Successful legitimizing tactics explain why industry has been less powerful than is commonly thought in shaping agricultural policy in Europe and pharmaceutical policy in the United States. In both instances, weak interests carried the day."

Discussion

The flawed legacy of Olson's Collective Action theses

David Bollier:

"First, a quick review of Olson, who in the 1960s was an economist at the University of Maryland. Olson pointed to the great effort that it takes to organize people with diffuse interests. It’s hard for them to find each other, come together, and then organize themselves to advance their collective interests. The “logic of collective action,” as Olson put it, is that individuals are so fragmented and diverse that it is difficult for their collective interests to be represented in the public policymaking. That’s why it’s so darn hard for citizens to prevail against corporate lobbies, who tend to have the advantage in securing government favors, subsidies, legal entitlements, etc.

Olson took the economic premises of the “tragedy of the commons” (individuals cannot overcome their narrow self-interest) to the world of politics and policymaking. Not only is it difficult for individuals to organize themselves to manage resources for shared benefit (leading to the tragedy of the commons), it is difficult for them to express their interests through government (because concentrated, well-organized political interests can easily impose their narrow political priorities).

The implied answer to these dilemmas, of course, is a greater reliance on private property and “free markets.”

The Olson analysis is part of the “public choice” school of thought about the political economy that holds that “rational citizens” have insufficient incentives to become informed citizens and to vote. As Wikipedia puts it, “the rational decision for each voter is to be generally ignorant of politics and perhaps even abstain from voting. Rational choice theorists claim that this explains the gross ignorance of most citizens in modern democracies as well as low voter turnout.”

Rauch explains the political significance of Olson’s theory for his times:

- [Olson’s Logic of Collective Action] blew a hole in the hull of American political science’s leading postwar theory, pluralism, which saw transactional interest-group politics as basically fair and functional so long as everyone was at the bargaining table. Wrong, said public choice: the table is tilted. Unusually, the public-choice analysis found support from both ends of the political spectrum. Liberals embraced the idea that the system was biased toward the concentrated power of corporations; conservatives embraced the idea that political decision making is inherently unfair. Down went pluralism." (http://bollier.org/blog/logic-collective-action-fall-iconic-theory)

Going beyond Olson

David Bollier:

"Author Gunnar Trumbull takes apart the venerable Olson thesis. The reviewer Rauch summarizes the reasons:

- In fact, weak, diffuse groups have a paradoxical political advantage: precisely because they are weak and diffuse, the public sees them as less self-interested and thus comparatively trustworthy. Second, Olson also underestimates the power of ideological motivation, rather than just money and concentration, to spur activism. Third, “diffuse interests can be represented without mobilization,” thanks to activism by politicians and government officials who take up their cause. (FDR started a federal pension program at a time when “retirees,” as a self-identified social class, did not yet exist. The program created the constituency, rather than the other way around.) Fourth, weak or diffuse interests can link up with concentrated groups to amplify their effectiveness, as when consumers align with exporters to oppose trade protections or when free-speech advocates join with political parties to oppose campaign-finance limits.

In our times, there is an even more compelling reason for concluding that Olson’s analysis is wrong. The rise of the World Wide Web since 1994 -- and since then social networking, wikis, and countless other innovations -- has made it ridiculously easy for people to find each other and organize to publicly advance their shared interests. That’s one reason that the commons is so robust today – the coordination and communication barriers among people have virtually disappeared in online spaces.

Rauch’s review of Strength in Numbers takes on more subtleties and counterarguments than I’ve recounted here, so it’s worth reading the full review. But one lesson that emerges for me is this: now that collective action is so empowered by digital platforms, it’s time for government policymaking to start to take account of this development and make better use of it in its own governance. They could start by recognizing the very idea of the commons as a useful, socially resilient and politically legitimate vehicle for achieving important work. If government can charter financial mafias known as banks and corporations, ostensibly to advance the public interest, why not the commons?" (http://bollier.org/blog/logic-collective-action-fall-iconic-theory)

Turnbull's Case

Jonathan Rauch:

" Trumbull, a professor of business administration at Harvard, argues that Olson missed at least half the picture. Diffuse interests can organize, often surprisingly easily, and they in fact do organize all the time. Yes, the challenges of mobilizing a broad but shallow interest are real, but “the incentives to overcome these challenges are frequently even greater,” he writes. “Diffuse interests have historically nearly always found representation in public policy. Across the advanced democracies, diffuse groups like retirees, patients, and consumers enjoy strong protections — protections that were opposed by industry.”

Business-school professor that he is, Trumbull proceeds by marshaling case studies. Starting in the 1960s, consumer groups sprouted across the United States and Europe, and with them laws and agencies (like the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, created in 1972) that sought to safeguard consumer interests. In Germany, small shopkeepers prevailed in a battle to handcuff big-box retailing. (In France, by contrast, the big retailers won.) Britain and France both passed consumer-credit regulatory regimes, though of very different sorts. (Britain sought to ensure broad access to credit, France to protect against predatory lending — antipodal notions of consumers’ interest, a point I’ll return to.) In France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, pharmaceutical companies, despite their concentrated money and firepower, failed to ward off heavy regulation. (Though, again, the regulatory regimes are very different, with the United States targeting safety and France low prices.)

So the bumblebee flies, whatever Olson’s theory may posit. How? First, according to Trumbull, Olson underestimates diffuse groups’ ability to develop compelling narratives about how they serve the public interest. In fact, weak, diffuse groups have a paradoxical political advantage: precisely because they are weak and diffuse, the public sees them as less self-interested and thus comparatively trustworthy. Second, Olson also underestimates the power of ideological motivation, rather than just money and concentration, to spur activism. Third, “diffuse interests can be represented without mobilization,” thanks to activism by politicians and government officials who take up their cause. (FDR started a federal pension program at a time when “retirees,” as a self-identified social class, did not yet exist. The program created the constituency, rather than the other way around.) Fourth, weak or diffuse interests can link up with concentrated groups to amplify their effectiveness, as when consumers align with exporters to oppose trade protections or when free-speech advocates join with political parties to oppose campaign-finance limits.

All in all, then, “the obstacles that coordination problems pose for diffuse interest representation have been overstated.” And this has some meaningful implications. To the Left, it suggests that suspicion of supposedly all-powerful corporate interests has been overdone. To the Right, it suggests that politics can be a legitimate broker of diverse interests after all.

WWOS — what would Olson say? He lived, after all, until 1998, and he was a politically sophisticated man. He was well aware that Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, AARP, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Medicare had come into being. In writing my own book drawing on his work, I interviewed him a number of times, and we talked about these very questions.

Were he around today, I imagine he might make three kinds of rejoinders to Trumbull. First, he would graciously accept Trumbull as a useful reminder that the world is a complicated place where single-cause theories are always wrong. Olson did not say diffuse interests cannot organize, any more than Newton’s gravitational theory says you can’t walk uphill. He said it is harder, other things being equal, for diffuse interests to organize. But, of course, other things are not equal. Policy entrepreneurship, public opinion, ideological motivation, public-interest narratives, coalition politics, and many other things also matter. Of course!

He might go on to note some chinks in Trumbull’s armor. Trumbull’s counterexamples date mainly from the 1960s and 1970s, a unique period of regulatory growth. Some of the diffuse-interest organizations he cites were seeded with government support, which is cheating. More importantly, Trumbull, I think, is naive about the problem of false or misguided claims of representation. Public-choice analysts have argued plausibly that self-styled consumer groups, for example, lobby not for the correctly understood interests of consumers (low prices, well-functioning markets) but for the policy preferences of a left-leaning urban elite. The very fact that “consumer-credit protection” can translate into opposite policies in Britain and France suggests that there is often no clearly definable consumer interest to represent. We know, indeed, that advocacy groups frequently define the mission before assembling the membership — and then adjust both as needed to stay in business. Trumbull, then, may not so much demonstrate that diffuse interests can reliably organize as that special-interest groups often organize in their name." (http://www.american.com/archive/2013/february/was-mancur-olson-wrong)