Interest Group Liberalism
The second critique, that the rules of the game are not followed, is the burden of the very common rhetoric that the public interest is shunted aside in the pursuit of special interests. Theodore J. Lowi takes the argument a step further. In perhaps the most influential book on the rules of the game in the past quarter century, The End of Liberalism, Lowi argues that a new set of rules, "interest-group liberalism," emerged from pluralist analysis and produced rules that cannot be followed if one wishes to govern. The new ideology argued that the endless battle of interest groups was good by denying the existence of a public interest to be contradicted. In thus justifying our politics, Lowi argues, this ideology lost the justification of government. If the state's actions are merely the current balance of interests, why should losers obey? Government is left with no special legitimacy, no authority separate from society. But a government that cannot separate itself from society cannot govern. People must obey because the government decided, not because their interests are served by the decision. Pluralism as an ideology, to Lowi, abdicates authority.[38]
Lowi denies that the state is an attitude or an interest like any other.
Its defining attribute, the legitimate use of coercion, requires special justification.[39] In this he must be right; at the extreme, the attitude of the state is the soldier's willingness to kill another human being at the orders of his government. Preferences about commodity tax straddles are not of the same order.
We need not agree with either Lowi's construction of interest-group liberalism or his opinion of its influence to agree that the legitimacy of the state—citizens' willingness to accept government's decisions—requires believing the political process creates something more than just a bargain reflecting the balance of power among the currently organized. A majority of groups is not enough to justify coercion—state power over a minority. Instead, government in the democratic state must be able to claim that in some way—some characteristic of its decisions or of how they are made—it represents "the people," not some subset of groups.
We might ask why all the people not affected by a policy should be involved in making it. Normally they care little and know less. That is why we have subgovernments, such as the nexus of interest groups, congressional committees, and agencies that make agricultural policy. Some tendency in that direction is unavoidable; if others don't care, it may be justified. But these subgovernments neither raise their own revenues nor pay their own costs. They are funded by taxes, mostly paid by other people. On what basis, other than fear, are citizens to accept this application of government's coercive powers?
When Charles Anderson wrote that "interest group pluralism is simply not a theory of representation," he confronted the essential difficulty.[40] Grant McConnell crystalized the problem in regard to subgovernments and, even more, organizations that have power sanctioned but not directly controlled by the state, such as corporations and unions. "The problem," he wrote, "is authority. What justifies the existence of power; by what principle is it rightful? For if it is not justifiable, power is properly open to attack and, if possible, destruction."[41]
What rules legitimate authority; do they work? A pluralist line of defense emphasizes that procedures provide acceptable outcomes in the long term. Groups left out in one coalition can join another; groups that lose one time win at another. The difficulty with this standard is that it is not a standard at all. It does not say the rules are intrinsically good; they are to be judged by the long-term substantive consequences of group competition. Thus, one is left without a criterion of judgment that is procedural or substantive. Who is to say how long a term is appropriate, or whether the outcome reached at any point is satisfactory? Both our "disappointed Democrats" on the left and our foes of big government (Gramm, Stockman) on the right rejected the bargain and therefore the
way it was made. Lowi argues that this pluralist argument fails precisely because it places no special value on the formality of rules.[42] It eliminates the distinction between a law and a bargain.
Effective governance, in Lowi's formal procedural view, requires affected interests see and feel that the state's decisions are based on considerations on which they, the affected interests, have no claim to superior judgment. If the basis of legitimacy lies in democratic forms, then the state, to be powerful, must be visibly democratic. The ostensible rules must be the real rules. Lowi wants to free both the public and the state from the power of private interest groups by committing the government to clear statements of policy objectives embodied in legislation. That is possible only if political debate is phrased in terms of competing ideologies, of arguments about justice, rather than focused on the peculiarities of individual policy domains that few people understand.
Budget stories almost catalog the objections to Lowi's thesis. Two are primary. First, ideology provides only a limited guide to effective policy. Effectiveness depends not only on perceived legitimacy but also on technique. Policies that do not fit ideology may work; policies that fit ideology may not work. Neither competing conception of justice in welfare programs has told us how to reduce poverty. Free-market Republicans have trouble applying their ideology to farmers. Where a Stockman sees a failure of conviction, we point out that the failure is just as plausibly within the ideology itself. In short, what amateurs at OMB or in the public may understand about a policy—is it interventionist or market-oriented, expensive or cheap, better for poor people or rich?—likely is not all we would want to know. There must be some role in the debate for expertise based on experience; and that lets the special interests (recall these are the people immediately affected by decisions, hence, self-interested) back in.
Second, even more important, there may be no majority for any particular conception of justice or the public good in a policy dispute. There obviously is no such majority in the argument over the budget deficit. Then what? What happens when, in effect, Lowi gets his way and rival conceptions of the good budget clash over and over and over again?
Arguments about justice rarely convince one side it was wrong. Both Stockman and the liberal budgeters were disappointed in their hopes that a budget crisis—by posing the issue as "what is right?"—would favor their side. People do not change their judgments of morality very easily. Thus, a politics of justice or ideology leaves little room for persuasion; that is what we mean by a polarized debate. Such a situation leaves no more room for compromise.
Lowi relies on procedure. Yet when issues are posed so that any solution clearly opposes the will of majorities, but procedure requires majority
support, the result is stalemate. The budgeting solution has almost parodied what Lowi condemns in other policies: obfuscation, lies, passing the buck, evasion. Where budget politics is most visible, as on budget resolutions (never mind GRH), it is also most dishonest. This results not from a failure to have a politics of principle but from the inability to assemble a majority that way. What Lowi desires to make decisions easier to enforce—clarity based on open discussion of principle—is precisely what makes decision itself most difficult.
"You must first enable the government to control the governed," Lowi quotes James Madison, "and in the next place oblige it to control itself." We would add that, if government is to enforce decisions, it must first be able to decide. In a sense, we have had an experiment in Lowi's style of democracy. New procedures (budget resolutions and reconciliation) and new conditions (the massive deficit) made budget politics far more ideological, more public and less private, than in the bad old days of the 1960s and 1950s. Then the bad old days started looking a lot better.