Unequal Representation: Membership Input And Interest Group Decision-Making

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Term Paper Title	Unequal Representation: Membership Input And Interest Group Decision-Making
# of Words	5481
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	21.92

Unequal Representation: Membership Input and Interest Group Decision-Making
Introduction
Interest groups play a key mediating and representational role in politics. In the theory of pluralist politics, organized groups represent the interests of varied segments of society in the national policy process. These groups organize to represent the views of their members in the halls of Congress, administrative agencies, and federal courthouses, giving voice to their members' interests in all policy making arenas. The competition from the varied organized groups provides valuable information for policy makers and, again in theory, helps ensure that government remains responsive to those affected by public policy.
At one point in time, pluralist theory was thought to hold that nearly all interests were represented nearly equally, or at least in reasonably balanced proportions, in the political process. Critics of pluralism, such as Schattschneider (1983) and Walker (1966), began to call attention to distinct inequalities in the interest group system of representation, finding that elite and industrial interests typically had better organizational representation in politics. In Schattschneider's famous phrase, the "chorus" of interest groups sung "with a strong upper-class accent" (1983: 34-35). At the time Schattschneider wrote, only a small segment of interests in society were represented by organized groups, and these groups primarily were organized to represent businesses or professionals.
Mancur Olson (1971) challenged conventional pluralist theory further with his elucidation of the logic of collective action. Olson's work helped explain the mobilization of bias observed by Schattschneider by illuminating the free rider effect and other obstacles to organizing in order to secure public goods, challenges which seemed most insurmountable for citizen groups organized to secure diffuse benefits or prevent diffuse costs. Yet at the same time that collective action theory was revealing to scholars the flaws in standard pluralist accounts of interest group formation, the world of interest groups began seemingly to defy Olson's logic. The civil rights and women's movement, along with a host of environmental and consumer groups, emerged in spite of the theoretical limitations of collective organization. Over time these new citizen groups emerged as an institutionalized presence in Washington politics. Policy arenas once characterized as "iron triangles" or tightly...

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