Pluralist Interest Intermediation

Modern democracies are determined by a great number of diverse interests. That is why structures and actors that show and assert individual social interests are necessary. Nevertheless, although [Page 1873]interests can be articulated individually, a collective and organized representation of interests, called interest intermediation, promises greater success. Because of this, organized interest intermediation plays an increasingly decisive role in the political process. It belongs to democracy “like the piston belongs to the cylinder” (Ralf Kleinfeld, 2007, p. 7), because without organized aggregation and articulation of interests, modern societies and democratic forms of government would not be able to act. Modern democracies show very different structures of interest intermediation. Corporate and pluralistic systems of interest intermediation can be distinguished. The interest of political science in this process lies, in particular, in the identification of regular patterns of interest intermediation and conflict resolution. However, before the process of interest intermediation is dealt with in more detail, the concept of interest must first be defined. This is followed by a discussion of major actors, their patterns of interaction, and the respective concepts in political science.

According to Carola Schulz (1984), interests can be defined as “action-relevant consolidations of needs which arise from the subjective perception of situations where a distinct feeling of want is present” (p. 15). For citizens' needs to find their way into the political system, they must be articulated and organized. It is exactly here that political interest intermediation applies. Since political systems are social systems that make collectively binding decisions, it is helpful to bring in a theoretical perspective from systems theory in order to illustrate the process of interest intermediation more closely. Here, the classic model developed by David Easton can serve as a basis. To be sure, Easton's model expresses a concept of democratic ideals, but it facilitates a brief representation of the procedural character of interest intermediation. For Easton, the decisive actors of the political system are the parties and interest groups, on the one hand, and government and the administration, on the other. Interactions between these actors are aimed at generating collectively binding decisions. Demands for such decisions are brought into the political system as inputs, processed where appropriate, and converted into outputs. At best, these outputs result in the fulfillment of these demands and thus enhance the legitimization of the political actors and therefore the political system itself. In turn, this may lead to new demands being brought into the political system in a feedback cycle. For this reason, Easton places both political demands and political support on the input side. In this context, politics can be defined as the process of the production and enforcement of obligatory cross-societal decisions.

Political demands are the necessary raw material for the political process. During their processing, however, problems can occur since, on the one hand, not all demands can be integrated and, on the other, not each demand for a collectively binding decision can be fulfilled. Demands can contradict each other, and a state's resources are limited. According to Easton, for demands to enter the political system at all, structural mechanisms such as parties and organized interest groups are necessary. As such, they have an intermediate function between the political system and society at large.

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