Major Interest Groups Research Articles

Does Centralized Collective Bargaining Promote Wage Restraint? The Case of Israel

This study examines whether centralized collective bargaining promoted wage restraint in Israel in the period 1968–84. Wage determination in Israel appears to be highly centralized, and the author shows that wage increases under central settlements during the period studied were almost invariably consistent with the goal of preserving competitiveness. Except in periods when there was consensus among major interest groups that sacrifice was necessary, however, wage drift tended to render the central federation's exercise of restraint ineffective. These results, the author concludes, support the view that consensus, and not the structure of collective bargaining per se, is the key to success in “corporatist” economies.

Should America Go to War? The Debate over Foreign Policy in Chicago, 1939–1941. By James C. Schneider. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. 289p. $37.50.

In examining public debate over foreign policy in the United States between the outbreak of World War II and America's entry into the war, Schneider focuses on Chicago, a major metropolitan area that encompasses virtually every major interest group found in the nation. Analyzing opinion and activity among these groups, he reveals how widely the controversy raged and how foreign policy considerations cut across other interests. The debate splintered public opinion at the very moment when unity was most needed. Originally published in 1989. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Policy, Politics, Health, and Medicine: A Marxist View

Policy, Politics, Health, and Medicine: A Marxist View

Restraining the Governors: The Nordic Experience with Limiting the Strong State

The combination of a tradition of arbitrary royal government and popular intolerance, with the existence of extensive, unitary and highly centralized institutions of government, and with the dominance of government by a single, reformist party for more than a half century would seem a potent recipe for governmental abuse of individual and minority group rights. That is especially true in the absence of the formal constitutional safeguards used to preserve rights elsewhere Yet the Nordic democracies have in fact proved exemplary in protecting civil liberties Why? This article challenges the view that Nordic political societies are consensual historically or by nature, and it describes the limited traditional institutional checks on abuse of individual and minority rights by government Instead it finds the basis for the Nordic democracies' excellent record in civil liberties in the combination of (1) the development of new, non‐traditional institutional checks on government. (2) the use of direct democracy as a check on parliamentary majorities. (3) the pervasive use of corporatist channels encompassing the major oppositional interest groups to draft and implement legislation, and (4) the effective constraints placed on decisions by parliamentary majorities by the pattern of fierce partisanship in the finely balanced parliamentary party constellation These protections for individual and minority liberties arise primarily from the assumption that basic conflicts of interest are a fact of political life and that they should be institutionalized.

The Evaluation of a Nigerian Primary Teacher Education Programme

Abstract A pre‐service Nigerian teacher education programme was evaluated to determine the degree of congruence among the perceptions of major interest groups involved in the programme. Twenty‐one programme lecturers, 106 students, 162 graduates and 51 employers were involved. A five point Likert‐type 30 item rating scale was used to collect data which were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The respondents unanimously agreed on 12 favourably oriented variables, unanimously disagreed on four and expressed mixed opinions on 14. Possible explanations of these findings and their implications for the improvement and development of primary teacher education programmes are discussed.

Living to Tell the Tale: Researching Politically Controversial Topics and Communicating the Findings

Doing politically controversial research on education issues at the statewide level presents a host of human problems in addition to technical, scientific ones. Drawing on research experience in a highly charged political context, this paper suggests practical strategies for gaining access, developing legitimacy, and communicating information in order to influence policymakers. We emphasize the importance of forming a steering committee to represent major political interest groups.

Political Gangsters and Nazism: Some Comments on Richard Hamilton's Theory of Fascism. A Review Article

Recent scholarship on fascism has generated an impressive array of studies on the social basis of modem Europe's most destructive and dangerous political movement. These works have argued that older theories explaining the causes and outcomes of fascist movements and regimes were inadequate because they lacked close empirical analysis of the people who supported fascism. In historical research on Nazism this general critique articulated with a growing attack on scholarly preoccupation with state administration, national elites, major special interest groups, and foreign policy.2 Predictably, such useful and justifiable responses to the lack of social analysis in the study of European and German fascism have produced a number of problems. Whereas theorizations of the 1950s and 1960s were based on thin empirical foundations, new social scientific research, by stressing largely quantifiable issues in the history

A Model of the Political Economy of International Investment Sanctions: The Case of South Africa

SUMMARYMany advocates of sanctions against South Africa have proposed that such measures will reduce the wealth of white South Africans and thereby raise the costs of apartheid to those who benefit from it by such a large amount that whites will voluntarily choose to terminate the apartheid system. This paper examines the likely effects of disinvestment sanctions on the survivability of apartheid. An ‘interest‐group’ model of the South African state is developed, in which apartheid policies are treated as endogenous outcomes of a political decision‐making process. The effects of sanctions are introduced through the impact of international capital flows and asset prices on the major interest groups within the white electorate. It is shown that disinvestment policies may not diminish apartheid via market effects, but could have an impact upon the political costs of maintaining apartheid institutions.

Environmental issues in the United States‐Mexico borderlands

Environmental issues, while often important in the history of United States-Mexico relations, have become, in recent years, a major factor in the relations between the two countries. One reason is that until very recently environmental issues simply were not perceived to be major problems in either country. Certainly since 1970 they have become important political issues on the public agenda of both countries. Major interest groups and governmental agencies are actively concerned with the environment and public policy to improve it. A second reason is that with the exception of the Colorado River salinity issue and the Chamizal dispute as well as some localized phenomena, environmental problems have become major ones only in the last few years in the borderlands region. In turn, a major reason for both public concern and for threats to the environment is the rapid rate of population increase in the borderlands. The border population has literally exploded in the last two decades and that means it carries far more political weight in both political systems and that the burgeoning cities along the border have become the centers of increasing environmental degradation. A review of these environmental issues in the borderlands will start with a general framework for the analysis of U.S.-Mexico relations, then a brief discussion of the major issues and, finally, recent developments which appear to indicate that there is an emerging binational political framework which could lead to a better environment for borderlands residents.

Coping with Budget Deficits in Sweden

During the late 1970s and early 1980s Sweden's budget deficits grew more rapidly than in probably any other country of Western Europe. Government policy responses developed in three phases. In the late 1970s there was very little action taken to cope with run‐away deficits. From 1980 to 1982 a strategy was formulated and partly implemented which heavily emphasized austerity measures through expenditure cuts. From late 1982 a ‘mixed’ strategy has been pursued which combines less drastic cuts with selected revenue increases. The virtual lack of response in the late 1970s and the turn‐about in 1980 may be explained by reference to four major categories of factors: the severity and longevity of the economic crisis itself and the prevailing interpretations of its root causes; the dynamics of public sector growth and the understanding of the processes involved; the ideological and policy predispositions prevalent among policy‐makers, economists, major interest groups and the public at large; and, finally, a set of ‘organizational’ factors mainly associated with the parliamentary situation in Sweden.

Last of the Classical Republicans: An Interpretation of John C. Calhoun

LAST OF THE CLASSICAL REPUBLICANS: AN INTERPRETATION OF JOHN C. CALHOUN /. WÜliam Harris John C. Calhoun has always been something of an anomaly in the American political tradition. A politician who strovemightily to achieve the presidency, he is nevertheless remembered above all as a systematic thinker. Yet as a thinker he has always been hard to place within the political tradition because he thought and wrote in defense of a cause both lost and, in twentieth-century eyes, immoral. His contemporaries divided sharply in their interpretations ofhis career. Some, most notably John Quincy Adams, but including many southerners as well, saw him as poisoned by a grasping ambition, willing even to split the union in order to become president of a Southern confederacy. By contrast, most ofhis fellow South Carolinians, at least in public, saw him as a paragon of political virtue, consciously throwing away his chance for the greatest political prize in order to defend his section. Calhoun himself professed to be a conservative Union man, devoted only to the defense of liberty against tyranny. ] Withthe passage oftime, interpretations of Calhoun havemultiplied. Late nineteenth-century historians tended to see him in much the same terms as the abolitionists before the war: fatally flawed by ambition and by defense of an indefensible institution; the epitome and leader of the Slave Power. In the twentieth-century, Calhoun's reputation underwent a curious revival. Taking him at his word as a defender of minority rights, some argued that he should be seen as the theorist of the liberal broker state. His famous theory of the "concurrent majority" (of which more later) was, according to Peter Drucker, simply an accurate description of the informal workings of modern American politics, with every major interest group having an effective veto on major government policies.2 Richard Current effectively demolished this interpretation of Calhoun, who would have been displeased to be seen as promot1 For a brief but insightful discussion of the historiography on Calhoun, see Richard N. Current, John C. Calhoun (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966). 2 Peter F. Drucker, "A Key to American Politics: Calhoun's Pluralism," Review of Politics 10 (1948):412-26. 256CIVIL WAR HISTORY ing precisely the type of factional political dealing he blamed for America's troubles. Current himself, and afterwards, more famously, Richard Hofstadter, proposed another interpretation of Calhoun. "The key to Calhoun's political philosophy," Current wrote, ". . . is a concept of the class struggle."3 Or, as Hofstadter put it, Calhoun was the "Marx of the Master Class," anticipating much of Marx's economic analysis of society, while choosing the side of the ruling class instead of the proletariat.4 In the midst of the Civil Rights revolution, Calhoun seemed a less apt defender of minority rights in the abstract. At the same time two analyses of his thought emphasized its inconsistencies and illogicalities. William W. Freehling pointed out that Calhoun seemed unable to decide between economic interest and political corruption as the basic problematic of politics.5 And Louis Hartz argued that Calhoun's thought was fatally flawed by a mixture of Lockean liberalism and conservative organicism.6 I wish to suggest that all of these interpretations have some merit in illuminating aspects of Calhoun's thought, but that none have gotten to the heart of it. The problem has been a tendency to see Calhoun too much with the light of hindsight—in terms of what he did, or did not, correctly anticipate in later political thought or practice. I propose instead to follow a suggestion made by Pauline Maier, that Calhoun is most properly seen as a son of the eighteenth century.7 The proper context for Calhoun is not modern liberalism, Marxism, or organicism, but eighteenth-century republicanism. Indeed, I will suggest that in many respects Calhoun is a pre-eighteenth-century republican. Republican thought gives us the surest angle for understanding Calhoun's preoccupations , and the solutions he proposed for the political evils he perceived . It is also the key to both Calhoun's originality and limitations as a thinker. Calhoun's mature political theory began with Aristotle's dictum that man is essentially a social being, and that the social...

Survival of the fittest? The democratization of hospital administration in Quebec.

In 1973 the Canadian Province of Quebec "democratized" its hospital boards of directors by replacing their traditional lay community or religious members with individuals more representative of the hospitals' major interest groups. In the province's English-speaking hospitals, patients, community organizations, physicians and nonprofessional hospital employees elected representatives to boards that were formerly comprised mostly of business executives. After a brief description of the social organization of the former "elite" boards and their role in the distribution of power within hospitals, the paper demonstrates how the "elite" board members and hospital administrators retained control despite "democratization." Several theoretical explanations for this outcome are critically examined in the light of these empirical findings. One suggestion is that the "elite" administration survived democratization because it was "fitter" in terms of ability to influence the hospitals' major economic and political constraints.

Member influence in cooperatives: Contributions of Scandinavian studies to the research conducted in the United States

This literature review summarizes research on member influence in cooperatives conducted in Scandinavia and some of the research conducted in West Germany. The review divides the contents of member influence into three components; individual factors, the cooperative organization’s internal factors and the organization’s external factors. As individual factors, participation, representation and representativeness are considered. Conflicts in cooperative organizations, the effect of the growth of the organization and the rules of decision making are discussed as organizations internal factors. The major interest groups in addition to members (the market, personnel and the society) are presented as external factors. The external factors are increasingly challenging the nature of cooperatives as member interest organizations.

Member influence in cooperatives: Contributions of Scandinavian studies to the research conducted in the United States

This literature review summarizes research on member influence in cooperatives conducted in Scandinavia and some of the research conducted in West Germany. The review divides the contents of member influence into three components: individual factors, the cooperative organization's internal factors and the organization's external factors. As individual factors, participation, representation and representativeness are considered. Conflict in cooperative organizations, the effect of the growth of the organization and the rules of decision making are discussed as organizations internal factors. The major interest groups in addition to members (the market, personnel and the society) are presented as external factors. The external factors are increasingly challenging the nature of cooperatives as member interest organizations.

Hospital power structure and the democratization of hospital administration in Quebec

In 1973, the Canadian Province of Quebec ‘democratized’ its hospital boards of directors by replacing the previous ‘elite’ boards by boards representative of the hospitals' major interest groups. This study looks at the impact of these participatory boards on the distribution of power within hospitals, particularly their effect on the hospital administrators' position of control in relation to their boards of directors and medical staff. Findings include a deterioration in the administrators' sense of organizational control, a weakening of the boards' authority over physicians, and a concentration of decision-making outside of the boardroom.

The Changing Role of Local Advocacy in National Politics

Local government interest groups face their most difficult period since their founding in the '20s and '30s, as a result of federal resource reductions to cities and political changes in Washington that threaten their ability to influence national public policy decisions. This article provides a brief history of the rise and development of three major local interest groups (the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties). It then reviews the changing dynamics at the national level since the mid-1970s which have led these groups to lose access to key decision makers at the national level and face major disruption in their abilities to maintain effective local advocacy in Washington. Finally, the current options facing local interest groups in their efforts to maintain viable organizations in the 1980s are discussed.

The consumer as stakeholder and the implications for consumer organisations

At the enterprise level, the concept that the firm is responsible only to shareholders has largely been replaced by the “stakeholder” theory, i.e., that the firm's responsibilities extend much more broadly to include employees, customers, and society as a whole. This process has been paralleled at the macro level by the growth of “social contract” philosophies, which offer a growing share in policy determination to the major interest groups — business, trade unions, etc.

Descent from Qlympus: The Search for a New Consensus

The basic dilemma facing any American president in the foreign policy arena is the need for an active policy which can be made acceptable at home to a broad consensus of the American public, the media, major interest groups, and the legislative branch of government. This basic need to maintain domestic support for foreign policy is of course not unique to the United States but faces any government in a democratic system. The dilemma for American presidents grows out of the extent of American foreign commitments on the one hand and the particular nature of American political culture and its inherited political institutions on the other.

A Review of Party Reform Literature

Democratic party. Many of the contributors to the growing body of party reform literature have themselves been actively involved in party affairs. One explanation for this on-going professional involvement is that political parties are among the most open and easily penetrated of American political institutions. Scholars are not only able to study parties, but they can also tinker with party structure, become party leaders, and hold party office. The Spring 1981 issue of P.S. contains reports by sixteen political scientists who served as delegates to the 1980 national conventions. In a number of areas around the country, Committees for Party Renewal, composed of both political scientists and party activists, are holding meetings to discuss ways to strengthen the two-party system. Such participation at a policy-making level is usually not possible for students of the Pentagon, the United Nations, the Congress, or even major interest groups. Party activities and procedures are regulated by state law, and political scientists, like other citizens, have a right to participate with only minimal prerequisites, such as party registration. The reforms of recent years have further opened the parties to those who have knowledge of party procedures, and that usually includes political science professors. Finally, party leaders, recognizing a support group, often solicit and encourage academic participation; party activists from academia can move

How Interest Groups Select Issues for Rating Voting Records of Members of the U. S. Congress

This paper describes the criteria employed by several major interest groups in selecting issues for inclusion in the ratings of congressional voting records. Group emphasis on salient roll calls tends to weight the indices toward a few issues and to present a polarized view of congressional decision-making that may be misleading. The results confirm Kritzer's (1979) argument that members' ideology is best captured by scaling techniques.