Pluralism

Early Pluralism

We can trace pluralism back to the work of Arthur Bentley in his 1908 book The Process of Government. In response to Karl Marx's class theory, Bentley offered the idea of group theory. He suggested that society is made up of a set of potential groups: that is, people who have some feature in common, say black hair. They become an actual group when this feature becomes an interest: that is, when it affects their welfare. Thus if black-haired people were targeted for higher taxes, say, then they would become an actual group. Thus groups (or actual groups) are sets of people who share interests. In contrast to Marxist class theory, where exclusive groups face each other in mutual antagonism, group theory posits lots of crosscutting cleavages, because people are members of many groups, each potentially in conflict. Thus individuals as well as society as a whole have to trade off some of their interests for others. Bentley argued that we can see democratic politics as the pressure of groups attempting to secure their interests, and we can see governmental output as the result of this “parallelogram of forces.” In the 1950s David Truman revitalized these ideas (in his 1951 book The Governmental Process) and suggested that we can see the influence of interest groups pressuring government in Bentley's terms. Later still, in the 1980s the Chicago school of interest group theory, notably Gary Becker and Donald Wittman, mathematically formalized and defended this account.

Later Applications

Becker utilizes general equilibrium theory to produce his efficiency account of group activity. He suggests that in a democracy groups support their preferred candidates, oppose those they do not like, and control free riding within their own group. He then derives propositions about the optimal size of the group system. In his model, the weight of each group's political pressure is a type of production function that depends on the number of members and total political expenditure. Each group calculates its own optimal lobbying efforts, taking other groups' lobbying efforts as given. An equilibrium will result, given the size of the expected benefits to each and given their expected lobbying efforts. The model assumes that the benefits to be handed out are zero sum—what one side gets the other will not—and he assumes government will balance their budgets. The strongest groups will win out, but Becker, and Wittman following him, argue that the greater the number of groups the more equal will be the process.

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