Pressure politics 109their field of interest, and there are many other federal agencies engaged in
the regulation of business activity. The fifty states also have a wide variety
of regulatory functions, and the concentration of some types of business in a
few states, for example the insurance business in the Northeast, renders the
activities of these states particularly important in certain fields. State and
local regulation of road hauliers has been of particular importance in the
past because of the great variety of state laws concerning the taxation of road
transport and the standards that hauliers must meet in the construction and
operation of their vehicles. Local businesses are subjected to an enormous
variety of state and local regulations covering, for instance, health regula-
tions on the production of milk.
There is, therefore, enormous scope for business groups to interest them-
selves in, and to become involved in, the legislative and administrative op-
erations of government. Furthermore, the large volume of legislation on the
statute books that involves business operations, in a country where legislation
is subject to judicial review by the courts in order to test its constitutional
validity, means that businesses are quite frequently involved in litigation to
determine the extent of their rights and obligations under the law, right up
to the level of the Supreme Court of the United States. The size and power of
some of the corporations that thus come into contact with the government is
awesome – a few of them seem even to rival the government itself in the size
of their operations and the extent of their influence. Giants such as General
Motors or the American Telephone and Telegraph Company conduct their
own relations with the government, using all the paraphernalia of modern
public relations techniques.
The business community in general is represented in its contact with
government agencies by associations that specialise in representing their
members’ interests. A few of these, in particular the National Association
of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, and the
Business Roundtable, are nation-wide organisations claiming to speak for the
business community as a whole. But each branch of industry and commerce
has its own trade association to represent its interest. By 1961 there were
1,800 national trade associations in the United States, 11,000 state, regional
and local associations, and 5,000 local chambers of commerce. In 2004 there
were 34,000 trade associations listed at state and national level. The more in-
clusive an association attempts to be, the less likely it is to be able to develop
clear policy positions, except on a very few matters of common interest, or
to exercise leadership in business affairs; and when an association does take
a stand on a matter of importance the views of the leadership may be quite
unrepresentative of the membership of the association. Thus the larger and
more inclusive the group becomes, the more likely it is to suffer from the
same disabilities as those that beset the political parties themselves.
The operation of inter-group bargaining and the divisions within the busi-
ness community are illustrated by the way in which the battles over retail
price maintenance and the control over the production of natural gas were