Pressure politics 115safety regulations, particularly for automobiles, and in securing the passage
of legislation on pollution and consumer protection. For a time they seemed
almost to have replaced the labour unions as the main anti-business force
in the pluralistic politics of the United States, and they have certainly been
one of the reasons why business interests themselves have become more ag-
gressive in their behaviour. President Carter was criticised when making ap-
pointments to his administration for having paid too much attention to the
claims of the new public interest and cause groups, and too little to those of
the traditional labour and ethnic groups.
Interest groups at work
How do interest groups operate? The almost infinite flexibility of this type
of political structure is reflected in the wide variety of the methods open to
the interest group to try to achieve its aims. Groups can attempt to influence
public opinion through all the media of communication available in mod-
ern society – through the press, television, radio and internet – and using
all the modern techniques of the public relations industry. Or they can use
more direct methods of gaining the attention of the public, organising pro-
test marches or going to the extreme of sit-down strikes or even riots. When
these extremes are reached, of course, the groups concerned are close to re-
jecting the whole basis of the equilibrium theory of democracy through group
interaction in favour of a different type of politics: the politics of extremism.
The basis of pluralist democracy is agreement on fundamentals and upon
the necessity of using the ‘normal channels’ of the institutional machinery
to achieve group aims. When a group feels that its minimum demands are
unacceptable to the society in which it exists, it may opt out of the system,
cease to be an interest group, and attempt to become a revolutionary force.
As with so many of the distinctions used in the analysis of political activity, it
is not always possible in practice to draw hard and fast lines in order to label
particular groups as part of the interest group structure or place them out-
side it. Many groups hover on the fringes of the equilibrium system of politics
- the use of company police in the 1920s to quell strikers, the Minutemen,
the advocates of ‘black power’. It is one of the characteristics of the American
political system and of its ideological basis that there is a sizeable part of the
population that is potentially ready to step outside the framework of com-
promise politics to further its interest by violent means if necessary. Thus
the same group of people may be behaving at one moment as an interest
group and at another as a conspiracy. It is at this point that the government
ceases to be merely the neutral mechanism through which competing group
demands are reconciled and becomes again both the instrument of law and
order and the instrument for the imposition of policy, whether at Little Rock
or at Waco.
The normal channels of group activity, of course, relate very closely to
the institutional structures of government through which decisions are taken