Second, many voluntary organisations lobby the state to pass
legislation, or spend money on causes helpful to their client group.
Thus the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is the
major source of legislation in the UK after the government. Veterans
groups and the National Rifle Association are very influential on US
legislation. Some bodies, such as Mediawatch-UK, may do little other
than lobby various public authorities.
A British report (Knight, 1993/4) has advocated that these two
kinds of voluntary associations be formally separated with only
service organisations receiving charitable status and tax exemptions.
This seems to neglect the frequent interdependence of the two roles.
Service provision often leads to useful expertise in an area that the
government needs to listen to. Thus, Oxfam and Médecins Sans
Frontières can speak from extensive experience of development work
in Third World countries when lobbying governments for more
official aid. The National Association of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux
give useful and detailed information on the effectiveness of social
legislation by collecting information on the patterns of problems
reported by its voluntary advisers.
The voluntary sector is viewed by some politicians as a means of
combining the best features of the welfare state and the market. For
example recent governments in the UK have increasingly encouraged
both commercial and voluntary sectors to get involved in the pro-
vision of what were previously monopoly state social services. Whilst
the state continues to fund services, actual provision services such as
health and community care are increasingly delivered by the
voluntary and private sectors.
Rational policy making: bureaucracy
However much it may be thought appropriate to leave problems to
be solved by the action of the market or through communal or
individual initiatives, there will certainly be always a substantial area
for centralised action through state machinery. Although many such
problems will be tackled through negotiation in the sort of democratic
institutions described at some length in the previous chapter, these in
turn rest upon a foundation of bureaucratic state organisations,
which suggest policy solutions and implement them in a more or less
rational fashion. Here we seek to understand the role of such
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