Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

For a start, it seems too much to claim that the existence of groups was itself
an explanation and a justification of democracy. Also, it seems unrealistic to
argue that government is only a bystander, an umpire with no views of its own.
Pluralism has trouble explaining the fact that groups are not equal, or that some
groups always have the ear of government while others are ignored. As long as
pluralism is considered to be operant – government acts as the passive arbiter
of interest groups – there should be no particular problem in effectively delegating
policy-making to outside groups. However, if government is not a passive
arbiter between groups, or if some groups always dominate others, the
quality of policy-making may suffer from being left to interest groups.
There are similar problems if the relationship between government and
groups fits a corporatist model of interest group behaviour. The theory of corporatism
argues that there is a cooperative relationship between government
agencies and the interest group or groups representing the major beneficiaries;
this is usually seen as an agreement between big business, big labour and government.
Although the idea fits some countries at some times – for example,
Germany in much of the postwar period – corporatism as a theory has probably
declined in recent years. Big business, big government and big labour no
longer represent that much of a society and rarely do their interests seem in
concert compared with the society as a whole. Even where corporatist explanations
have seemed plausible, they have tended to fall down when more traditional
links between the three actors came into play, or as Dunleavy argues:
‘corporatism’s difficulties remain primarily empirical – the fact that many large
liberal democracies fit poorly with the immanent trend it identifies’ (1991,
p. 43). Also, agreement between these three large groups is not necessarily in
the interests of society as a whole. It could, for instance, disregard the interests
of consumers, small business or workers who are not in unions.
Pluralism and corporatism may be regarded favourably, and, if they are,
there would be no problem with a close relationship between groups and
bureaucracy. However, it can be argued that the interaction or over-reliance on
groups might lead to inferior policy outcomes.
Is group competition harmful?
Managing External Constituencies 213
Allowing policy to be made by groups could arguably make government less
effective. There are arguments that group competition is harmful to society as
a whole and the functioning of the political system. In different ways, although
both are from ‘rational choice’ economic theory (see Chapter 4), Olson and
Stigler argue that interest groups may cause undesirable policy outcomes.
Olson argued (1965, 1982) that pluralism is illogical and the pluralist view
is ‘fundamentally flawed’. Potential groups would not necessarily arise into
actual groups, as the organizer of a large group will not gain a large share of
the benefit of a policy change when compared to the costs of organization in
both time and effort. Instead of large groups being more important and more