Pluralism and the Dilemma of Public Authority
Our description of the governmental process can be incorporated into David Truman's. Truman sees politics as a competition of interests. An interest, to Truman, is simply an attitude. Some interests will be manifest in political organization; some will not. People sharing an interest organize in response to stimuli—perhaps changes in society, perhaps government policy. An interest may be unorganized (thus invisible) not because it is weak but because it is strong, that is, unthreatened.
Truman describes "interests or expectations that are so widely held in society and are so reflected in the behavior of almost all citizens that they are, so to speak, taken for granted." He calls these "widely held but unorganized interests 'rules of the game.'" These interests become, in Truman's model of group competition, "potential groups." These attitudes may be more strongly and precisely held "at the leadership level" than by "the mass of the population," but these "are interests the serious disturbance of which will result in organized interaction and the assertion of fairly explicit claims for conformity." Often these interests do not have to be visible because they have been embedded in the political structure. "As embodied in these institutional forms and in accepted verbal formulations … the interests of these potential groups are established expectations concerning not only what the governmental institutions shall do, but more particularly, how they shall operate." Organized groups with other attitudes must attempt not to violate these rules of the game for two reasons: the group's own members tend also to support the rules (Truman calls this overlapping interests), and others will oppose the group on the basis of rules alone. "Violation of the 'rules of the game' normally will weaken a group's cohesion, reduce its status in the community, and expose it to the claims of … competing organized groups that more adequately incorporate the 'rules,' or … [are] organized on the basis of these broad interests and in response to the violations."
Truman goes on to explain that these attitudes-cum-interests, inculcated in family, schools, and other experiences, are continually reinforced
in political combat. Public officials are under particular pressure to conform.
The strength of these widely held but largely unorganized interests explains the vigor with which propagandists for organized groups attempt to change other attitudes by invoking such interests. Their importance is further evidenced in the recognized function of the means of mass communication, notably the press, in reinforcing widely accepted norms of public morality.
These attitudes are not always and everywhere dominant because they may be substantively ambiguous (e.g., free speech), are not all equally fundamental, must compete with other interests, or their violation may not be visible.
All this fits the story of the budget deficit near perfectly. Balance is a rule of the game, a weapon in fights for other goals, enforced as an evaluative norm by the media and particularly pressed upon politicians. Economic policy making is also shaped by such "rules of the game." Truman goes so far, following Harold Lasswell, as to describe "the state" as a shared attitude, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger—"the unique mark of the state is the recognition that one belongs to a community with a system of paramount claims and expectations." Truman adds that "the existence of the state, of the polity, depends on widespread, frequent recognition of and conformity to the claims of these unorganized interests and on activity condemning marked deviations from them."[34]
Thus, the state is a state of mind, reproduced by processes of the public sphere that constitute the hegemony of the "rules of the game," meaning the established order. Truman views the legislature as another potential interest, occasionally manifest (lobbying regulation, his example; tax reform and GRH, ours). Although he does not predict when any given interest will dominate, his list of relevant factors is concise but exhaustive.[35]
The more they ask who actually does what to whom, the Marxists' picture looks more like the pluralist Truman's. Yet they give a different meaning to their picture by asking questions about the relationship between politics and society, about who wins and loses and why.
The question of bias—Does the system favor or work against poor people? Business? The national security?—is generally subsumed in a larger critique by scholars who feel the pluralist system is not sufficiently democratic; that is, it does not represent everyone equally.
We have argued that public opinion and the beliefs of public officials were the strongest forces in our budgetary decisions. When money (doctors and hospitals) confronted votes (the elderly) over medicare cost
reductions, votes won. But the elderly were not poor, either, and we have seen the advantages of organization: federal employee and retiree organizations work through the Post Office Committee to fend off the budgeters; farmers escape reconciliation with "cuts" designed to increase their incomes. All sorts of narrow interests have hitched rides on the continuing resolutions, where they might go unnoticed in the crowd. There are dramatic cases of politicians holding their noses and supporting a group—for example, the oil auction in 1981—because they found themselves in a pivotal position.
We have emphasized that the hegemonic "rules of the game" include prohibitions against certain policies; thus, they are biased. Truman sees those beliefs as an interest like any other; critics such as Murray Edelman see them as a means of deceiving majorities, diverting them from what he views as their real interests.[36] Both Truman and his critics are selfproving. If, like Truman, we say interest is whatever attitudes people have, "deception" has no meaning. If, like his critics, we say people's interests are what they think people should want, then, if the critics lose (which they must, that's why they are critics), the system is automatically undemocratic. These difficulties on both sides do not remove the larger issue: Do the rules of the game systematically favor some people over others?
The same people don't always win. Federal employees beat the budget cutters in 1980, lost in 1981, and fared a bit worse than a draw in 1982. The poor got cut in 1981, escaped afterward, and won big in 1986. These and other swings resulted not from changes in group resources but from changes in how the rules worked. For both the poor and business, the norm of fair shares required that the winners and losers of 1981 be reversed, though not enough to repeal 1981, in subsequent rounds. In many cases the rules required that majorities in separate institutions put first one interest, then another, in the position of being the marginal vote. In 1981 neither side could pass its tax package without support from the oil patch. In 1982 the budgeters could not pass the TEFRA tax hike without support from advocates for the poor.
These and similar examples show that the majority was not some preexisting entity. Instead, there are many possible majorities. To make the possible actual, majorities must be constructed by bargaining and compromising; that is the heart of democratic politics. In none of these instances did the group identified get its way in isolation: lots of other players accepted the package and also got something. Of course, more people are poor than own oil wells; to say either group can cut deals does not mean the system is equitable. If the bias that is revealed in policy changes, however, then it is possible to change results.
Early pluralists emphasized that results change due to a process of
stimulus and response. An interest that is hurt organizes and, because it tries harder in the next round, does better. Savings interest withholding is a wonderful example of that process: banks that did not fight hard on TEFRA decided they did not like the new law, mobilized, and overran Congress in 1983. Yet the overall swing against cutting the poor cannot be explained by such a response; liberal groups were neither immobile in 1981 nor crucial in 1982. It is true that businesses were more mobilized and united in 1981 than in 1982. But that shows the influence of politicians. When they set an agenda of business tax hikes, their stimulus created a different response—fragmentation and demoralization—than had been created in 1981.
If, with the pluralists, we speak of power eliciting countervailing power, we must say that countervailing power is not just out there in society but also in the norms and the actions of the political stratum, especially in Congress. Time and again they intervened to give, maintain, and take away according to two related but distinct notions of fairness: those who were advantaged earlier should make sacrifices later (business, the military); while those who had been hurt earlier (families with children, the working poor) should be recompensed later; and those whose total resource position was low (poor and disabled people) should be protected against further cuts. Not only are these norms openly avowed, but neither the favorable treatment of families and the working poor in the tax reform, nor the exemption of poor people's entitlements from all or most of Gramm-Rudman's proportional cuts, nor the increases in business taxes after 1981, nor the diminishing role of increases in defense after 1983 can be understood without them.
The attitude of "those who did well last time should sacrifice this time" might be called an interest. Indeed, if widely shared, it could be called a public interest. Then we could ask how large it was and whether policy favored other interests at its expense. Yet such bias would have very different meaning for society than would a bias against blacks, or capitalists, or any specific group of people. Here we reach the problem with Truman's notion of interest; it doesn't fit everyday notions. People tend to think of bias in terms of some objective aspect of people's lives, like their race or income, not their attitudes.
For purposes of evaluation, therefore, a distinction between attitudes not clearly associated with concrete groups and attitudes clearly fitting such groups is in order. The former category is particularly the province of the public sphere: attitudes the mass media believe they can invoke without being accused of taking sides. Truman's notion of "rules of the game" captures their sense: anybody in the game cannot object to a reminder of the rules. In this context, antipluralist critiques then take two forms; these values may in fact advantage one group over another
in ways that people, precisely because they hold these values, cannot see, and the values themselves are shunted aside too often, that is, are less influential than they should be.