A special-interest group is, by Reaganoid definition, any collective historical subject that dares to resist the stripped-down atomism of Star Wars, hypermarket, postmodern, media-simulated citizenship.
                                                -- Donna Harraway⁽¹⁾

When feminists are no longer interested in burning bras but rather in burning judges, they become a special interest group.
                                                -- Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-NH)⁽²⁾

The term "special interest" is one of those terms that makes politics what it is: no one can say exactly what the "special interest" label means, but everyone knows that it doesn't apply to them. "Special interest groups" are made responsible for rising taxes, delays in decision-making, the corruption of politicians, and the antagonistic tone of politics. The trouble is, in trying to locate this phrase in the social-discursive landscape, it is very hard to pin down the extension of the term (i.e., the limits on what groups can count as "special interest groups"), because no one wants to have the "special interest" label pinned on them. This combination of pejorative force and unclear extension makes it a powerful and highly contested keyword. Those who control the "special interests" label, who are able to make it stick, can use it to delegitimize other groups, be it the nuclear power industry or the NAACP. The struggle for control of the "special interest" label is a fascinating part of the history of 20th-century political discourse. Part of my aim here is to sketch a story of how the anti-trust battle cry of the Progressive Era became the smear phrase that the Republicans used against Walter Mondale.

In many current discussions of special interest groups, however, another theme emerges. Many of the political commentators who warn of the dangers of "special interest groups" apply the "special interest" label to any organization (aside from political parties) that seeks to affect political decision-making. They then go on to argue for a wholesale rejection of any such groups, as "special interests" undermining "the common good." In this essay, I shall take a closer look at some of these wholesale critiques. My claim will be that they are misguided.
 

I. THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF THE "SPECIAL INTEREST" LABEL

Since its formulation at the beginning of the twentieth century, the "special interest" label has moved through three major stages. In the first stage, during the Progressive Era, it was directed primarily against big business. In the second stage, talk of "interests" lost much of its critical edge, as political scientists argued that, since all groups were interest groups, no groups were "special" interest groups. In the third and current stage, the "special interest" label reemerged as a hybrid of the previous two usages, i.e., as both negative and categorical. On this view, any non-party organization seeking to affect political decision-making is rendered a "special interest group," and thereby suspect.

Despite the long history of both "special" and "interest," it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the two were combined into the "special interest" label. Today, a "special interest" can be defined quite generally, for example, as "a body of persons, corporation, or industry that seeks or receives benefits or privileged treatment, esp. through legislation."⁽³⁾ But at its birth in the Progressive Era, the "special interest" label was a watchword of muckrakers in their efforts to expose the corrupt connections between government and industry. This narrower application of the term exclusively to big business made "special interests" a child of the times. The usage of the "special interest" label reflected a new understanding of the corrupting influences of commercial organizations. As Richard L. McCormick has argued,⁽⁴⁾ the Progressives were galvanized by the systemic nature of big-business corruption. The problem was not the problem of a few greedy, conniving fat-cats. What the Progressives realized was that the interests of big business were not always the interests of the nation as a whole. In short, the "special interests" were to be contrasted with the "common good" or "the public interest." And, as the cultural historian Daniel Rodgers has shown, during the Progressive Era, this discourse of the common good existed side by side with a recognition that different social groups had incompatible interests:

Just as the Progressives' assault on the Interests particularized evils, however, it intensified in the same breath the reality of a common good. Even after it became clear that successful reform politics was coalition politics, that a reform program could not be sustained without recognition of the special grievances of labor, farmers, small businessmen, urban dwellers, women, and on through a score of competing claimants, the rhetoric of the moral whole endured."⁽⁵⁾

For a variety of reasons, however, during the 1920s and 1930s, this vocabulary of larger collective concerns -- "the People," "the Public," "the State," etc. -- gradually lost its ability to capture the imagination of Americans. A new doctrine of anti-metaphysical "realism" gained dominance: the whole became merely the sum of its parts; in the case of the political whole, those parts were interest groups. This is the view that became known as "interest group pluralism," and it created a new discursive space, one in which there is no way of criticizing the groups that the Progressives attacked as "special interests." To accuse an interest group of disregarding the public interest would be incoherent, because on this view, there is no public interest. For pluralists, interest groups were the political version of homo oeconomicus: individual agents rationally seeking to ensure that their pre-given interests are maximally met.

Although it dominated discussions in the two decades after the Second World War, interest group pluralism did not go unchallenged. Critics have emphasized the way in which "filtering mechanisms" in government controlled access to the political process and served to exclude some groups and privilege others. Differences in the resources of interest groups have also received a great deal of attention, resources that include money, personal contacts, and -- perhaps most important -- reliable, up-to-the-moment, well-presented information.⁽⁶⁾ For most critics, however, the basically pluralist assumption remained: politics is seen as a matter of competition among groups with legitimate yet incompatible interests. The criticism lay in showing that the conditions of competition among groups were not fair. The idea of a common good played no role.

The legacy of interest group pluralism is two-fold. First, by opening up the range of groups that could be labeled "interest groups," it paved the way for the contemporary application of the "special interest" label to both liberal and conservative groups. Second, the central claim of interest group pluralism -- that politics is a matter of competition among self-interested groups -- has become the focus of current wholesale critiques of interest group politics. I shall concentrate on the second set of issues, but before going on to that, let me briefly address the former set.

Despite the origins of the "special interest" label as term for criticizing the undue influence of big business, the phrase "pandering to special interests" is now regularly tacked on the Democratic Party. Republicans have gained enormous control over the "special interest" label, and have been able to construct the Democratic Party as "the party of special interests." Nowhere was that clearer than during the Mondale campaign of 1984. The image of Mondale as "catering" or "pandering" to "special interests" emerged early in 1984, and he was never able to shake the characterization of his bid for office as "the quintessential special-interest campaign."⁽⁷⁾ Who were the "special interests"? Organized labor, women, minorities, peace activists, the elderly, to mention a few. As John Kenneth Galbraith rather sardonically put it:

The conclusion seems inescapable. An interest group is any association of citizens that is numerous, most likely of low income and has aspirations that are unfulfilled. If the participants are affluent, small or manageable in number (the fundamentalists and the right-to-lifers are here an exception) and have already made it in Washington or elsewhere, they are not an interest group. Rather, they are a politically innocent expression of the American dream.⁽⁸⁾

In this connection, it is essential to note the role that Jesse Jackson played in both the Mondale and Dukakis campaigns. In the course of these elections, Jackson was constructed as special-interestedness incarnate, a symbol of the Democrats' special interest liability. And, to a significant degree, it was the ability of the Republicans to control the "special interest" label that rendered the Democrats unable to convince voters that they represented the concerns of the majority of Americans.
 

II. CRITIQUES OF SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS

For many critics of "special interest groups," however, the problem cuts across party lines; it is a problem that results from the tendency of a politics based on competing interest groups to undermine the common good. This thought provides the basis for several general critiques of interest groups.

Most specific critiques of interest-group politics are uncontroversial. Lobbyists often overstep their bounds. Politicians become addicted to the favors and services of some interest groups. Campaign finance laws are inadequate to deal with the pressures that are forcing candidates to turn to political action committees ("PACs") to pay the skyrocketing costs of running their campaigns. These specific critiques provide support for those who argue that interest-group politics is destroying "democracy" in the U.S., but they do not, in themselves, justify the more general critique of interest-groups that underlies the contemporary discourse on "special interests."

This general critique has been articulated in many different ways, but three particularly prominent versions have emerged in recent years, which I shall label "neo-populist," "Burkean," and "communitarian." Each of these approaches has its own distinct sense of how it is that "special interest groups" threaten democracy, but they all share the conviction that a conception of "the common good" must be recovered and opposed to "special interests." Thus, they all reject interest-group pluralism. They are in agreement that, in politics as in economics, the anarchic tendencies of a laissez-faire approach need to be regulated with an eye to the "public interest."⁽⁹⁾
 

A. The Neo-Populist Critique: "Defending the Taxpayer"

The neo-populist critique depends crucially on a distinction between "special interests" and "average taxpayers."⁽¹⁰⁾ On this view, the will of "average taxpayers" or "ordinary Americans" comes to represent "the common good." "Special interests" are contrasted with the people who contribute tax dollars and request little in return, perhaps only public schools, good roads, and police and fire protection. These people are presented as the backbone of the nation, as model citizens who neither make trouble nor place heavy demands on the government. They are modest, self-reliant, and responsible, in explicit contrast to "special interest groups," who are self-promoting, parasitic, and profligate. Particularly since the early-seventies, many of the people who think of themselves as average taxpayers began to feel that their modesty was a serious liability, that highly vocal and organized special interest groups were walking all over them. This led to the establishment of so-called "public-interest groups" dedicated to consumer rights, clean and efficient government, and low taxes. Their aim was to fight the special interests on their turf, using lobbyists, direct mailings, and other techniques, but at the same time to remain on the high moral ground of disinterested concern for the common good. Yet even though some public interest groups may be significantly motivated by altruistic concerns, it is usually not hard to see many of them as defending particular middle-class interests. In light of the abject poverty in which so many Americans live, the claim that "ordinary citizens" want to "get government off their backs" depends on a dubious distinction between "ordinary citizens" and "the poor."

Given how obvious the common good appears to neo-populists, the divergence from the path of what any "true American" would choose requires an additional explanation. The "new class" provides a convenient target of criticism. Neo-populists tend to portray the leaders of "special interest groups" as members of a powerful and corrupt "new class," one whose class interest lies in perpetuating a system of bureaucratic welfarism.⁽¹¹⁾ Neo-populists' use of the new class critique has two effects relevant to our discussion. First, the purported connections between "special interest groups" and the "new class" keeps the spotlight on those interest groups that are concerned with defending welfare measures. This reinforces the current image of "special interest groups" as primarily liberal groups. Second, because the term "class" is so foreign to U.S. political rhetoric, the association of the term "new class" with liberal groups considered "special interest groups" creates the impression that they are out of touch with "mainstream America."

The difficulty with this position -- what could be called "cost minimization as politics"⁽¹²⁾ -- is that it is far from obvious what the will of "ordinary Americans" is supposed to be. Neo-populists completely overlook the central problems of who decides what interests are shared and whether any interests that are not widely shared nonetheless deserve government benefits.
 

B. The Burkean Critique: Special Interests and the Crisis of Authority

What I am calling the "Burkean" critique represents a prominent strain of neo-conservatism.⁽¹³⁾ For Burkeans, the "common good" is not something obvious to any American, but rather something visible only to those with talent, education, and experience. Thus, discerning what the "common good" is and deciding how best to see it realized are tasks that are best left to the experts. On this view, defining the "public interest" is not a matter of democratic process, but of detached reflection , of "...what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently."⁽¹⁴⁾ The results of open and public dialogue serve only as data for the decision-making that occurs in the monological quiet of the legislative chambers. In a recent variation on this Burkean theme, Stephen Miller has asserted that

The best way to curb the power of special interests is to make the daily life of the congressman less of an ordeal than it is now, so that a career in politics will attract people of talent and ambition --people whose love of fame will give them the courage to say to their constituents, as Burke said to his, 'your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.' Only a strong Congress, composed of talented and ambitious people, will be able effectively to regulate...special interests.⁽¹⁵⁾

The concern with authority is closely connected to anxieties about the way in which the current system of interest group politics is "incoherent." Confusion, diffusion, incoherence, and chaos are recurring themes in the Burkean vein.⁽¹⁶⁾

Burkeans tend to connect the dangerous growth of "special interest groups" with the public's loss of trust in elected officials. In his Presidential farewell address, Jimmy Carter argued that a doubting attitude toward "Government" drew people to "single-issue groups and special interest organizations," and that this made the authority of the President a vital concern: "Because of the fragmented pressures of these special interests, it's very important that the office of the President be a strong one."⁽¹⁷⁾ It seems clear that there is a connection between mistrust of the government and a turn towards more rigid and myopic political position taking. What is not obvious is that the solution is to buttress the political authority of the President.

It is important to note that Burkeans do raise a genuine concern about the complexity of contemporary societies and the virtual impossibility of reaching anything approximating a consensus on difficult decisions -- especially with regard to large-scale initiatives (e.g., building public transportation) and matters that must be handled at the national or international level (e.g., national health insurance or immigration policy). This can seriously hamper the ability of governments to take the bold steps sometimes required. Politicians can become so wary of controversial issues that they are capable of nothing but a politics of postponement.

As Burkeans see things, "special interest groups" are in large part responsible for what makes bold, innovative decision-making nearly impossible in the present political climate.⁽¹⁸⁾ The Burkean solution to this problem, however, begs numerous issues of representation and participation, questions of who the "disinterested," expert, trustworthy representatives are going to be, how they will be chosen, and who shall decide when they ought to be shielded from challenges to their legitimacy. Until there is some agreement on how these questions are to be answered -- or even asked -- it will remain difficult to see the difference between the Burkean proposal and despotism, however enlightened.
 

C. The Communitarian Critique: The Moral Rejection of Self-Interest

The communitarian critique of interest group politics shares with the Burkean approach both a concern for a substantive conception of the common good and a belief that the unregulated play of self-interested forces is not likely to result in the common good being realized. Where it differs is in its focus on local, participatory political spheres rather than on powerful offices of political authority. Communitarians envision a politics of engagement and commitment that is the natural outgrowth of citizens' involvement and education in their particular community, but at the same time avoids being parochial or self-interested. The social glue that is to hold together communitarian forms of collectivity is not self-interest but a shared conception of the common good and a deep-rooted commitment to "a moral culture of justice, dignity, and fellowship."⁽¹⁹⁾ Communitarians insist that the content of this vision of ethical life is mediated by political participation and must always be open to criticism. They tend, nonetheless, to place one key restriction on the form that such political participation can take: participation based on an assertion of self-interest is deemed morally illegitimate. In Habits of the Heart, one of the central communitarian texts, the authors claim that

...social movements clearly lose their moral edge if they are conceived as falling into special pleading, as when the Civil Rights movement was transformed into 'Black Power.' Then we are back in the only semi-legitimate realm of the politics of interest.⁽²⁰⁾

In general, there is no way to know in advance whether the outcome of a deliberative process will be the discovery of a common good in which conflicts of interest evaporate as mere apparent or, rather, the discovery that conflicts of interest are real and the common good is chimerical. But if the existence of a common good cannot be presumed in advance, then there is no warrant for putting any strictures on what sorts of topics, interest, and views are admissible in deliberation.⁽²¹⁾

There are risks here. As civic republicans point out, there may be real worries about the way in which interest-based politics may harden lines of confrontation, thereby undermining the possibility for real dialogue. But there is also the worry that communitarians tend to equate conflict with selfishness, and then conclude that transcending a discourse of interests involves moving from conflict to solidarity. The thing about solidarity, however, is that it is only ever as good as the process that leads to it.
 

D. Interest Groups in the Public Sphere: Real Differences

What unites all three of these approaches in their rejection of interest-based politics is their conviction that politics must instead be based on some conception of the common good. This opposition between "special interests" and "the common good" recalls the contrast that reformers of the Progressive Era used in applying the "special interest" label. But there is a crucial difference. During the Progressive Era, the contrast between the two was clearer: the "special interests" were easily identified. The "robber barons" provided tangible targets for criticism, thereby relieving concepts of the common good of the task of grounding the distinction. It was probably not entirely clear to Progressives what, exactly, "the common good" was, but whatever it was, the "special interests" of big business were clearly undermining it. By contrast, contemporary critics of "special interests" have inherited the claim of interest group pluralists that all non-party political organizations are motivated by a desire to assert their own incompatible interests. Thus, although the three critiques of "special interests" reject the pluralists' faith in the marketplace of interest-based political influence, they have tacitly accepted the pluralists' claim that there are no essential differences among non-party political organizations.

The legacy of interest-group pluralism needs to be examined more critically than these critics have done. In concluding, I would like to suggest two ways of identifying significant differences between interest groups.

One line of division among interest groups is the level of grassroots participation in the organization. The exact split may not be clear, but the two ends of the spectrum are distinct enough. At one end, we can speak of interest groups as mechanisms for aggregating interests. The model here is one in which the basic structure of the organization differs little from that of a mail-order merchandising company: leaders of the interest group offer a product, a package of advocacy services, designed on the basis of exacting market research (involving questionnaires asking for members' "stand" on "the issues"), in exchange for membership in the organization and an annual check. At the other end of the spectrum, we find interest groups that operate as associations. This model involves a high level of participation and bottom-up policy-making. The most important feature of associations, however, is their role as social spaces for the formation of opinion and political will. Rather than treating members as having a set of pre-given preferences, associations provide a forum within which members can form their views in interacting with others. And rather than treating solidarity as a matter of the individual exertion of conscience, associations actively encourage commitment and solidarity by providing the context in which individuals can assure one another that acts of solidarity will not go unnoticed and will not be exploited.⁽²²⁾ Interest groups of both sorts may use similar tactics to influence politics, but it is hardly obvious that it is the "association" end of the spectrum that poses the "threat to democracy." In fact, the presence of associations may turn out to be a crucial feature of democracies.

A second distinction that can be made among organizations labelled "special interest groups" turns on features of the discursive terrain in which these groups move. The idea is that some interest groups have concerns that would survive translation from a discourse of "special interests" to a discourse of "special needs." One can speak plausibly of the mentally handicapped as a "group with special needs," but it could turn out to be more difficult to do the same with members of the National Rifle Association. I am not claiming that there will widespread agreement on precisely which groups have interests that could be convincingly expressed as needs. The only hope is that a move from interests-talk to needs-talk will shift the burden of justifying a legitimate place on the political agenda away from underprivileged groups and onto privileged groups. A vocabulary of "special needs" may allow marginalized groups to tap into new sources of support for affirmative action or welfare programs.⁽²³⁾

In drawing attention to these distinctions among so-called "special interest groups," my aim has been to challenge the emerging orthodoxy that views interest groups in general as threats to democracy. I do not mean to imply that the role of interest groups in U.S. politics is unproblematic. In particular, problems of myopic, single-issue politics remain. The situation calls for "intelligent self-restraint."⁽²⁴⁾ Finding common ground may not be as simple as many critics of "special interests" suppose, but to refuse to reach beyond one's own parochial interests is, in some sense, an indication of moral failure. That much is obvious, but it does not take us very far. Moralistic admonishments toward altruistic behavior fail to shed light on the real causes of single-issue politics. In order to adequately grasp the possibilities that specific groups have for generalizing their interests and acting in solidarity with an expanding circle of social groups, one needs to examine the broader social structure that Claus Offe has recently termed the "relations of association."⁽²⁵⁾ What needs to be understood is how the distribution of social power to political organizations affects their ability to be motivated by long-term and generalizable interests. Powerful unions, for example, may be in a position to give consideration to plant productivity during contract negotiations, but more vulnerable groups often have little confidence that the consideration they grant to opposing interests will be reciprocated. The lesson to be draw from these considerations is that critiques of the politics of single issues and "special interests" must take into account the fact that not all social groups are equally in a position to generalize their interests or to compromise their demands. Interest groups decide for themselves how cooperative or uncooperative they will be, but they make those decisions under conditions that are not of their own choosing.⁽²⁶⁾

1. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies, 14:3 (Fall 1988), p. 575.

2. Quoted in "How Civil Rights Came to Be a 'Special Interest,'" The New York Times, 17 January 1988, sec. 4, p. 1.

3. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., New York: Random House, 1987.

4. Richard L. McCormick, "The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism," American Historical Review, 86:2, April, 1981, pp. 247-74.

5. Daniel Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence, New York: Basic Books, 1987; p. 182.

6. See, for example, Edward O. Laumann and David Knoke, The Organizational State: Social Change in National Policy Domains, Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

7. Howard Fineman, "Promises, Promises," Newsweek, 9 Jan. 1984, p. 32-3.

8. John Kenneth Galbraith, "Interest Groups, By Any Other Name," The New York Times, 29 May 1988, p. 17.

9. There are still dissenters for this view. Reaganites, for example, define a special interest as any group that seeks advantages that it could not obtain in a pure "free market." (Arthur Stinchcombe helped me see this.)

10. Two examples of this neo-populist line are: Peter Navarro, The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues Are Stealing America, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984; and James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics, Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1985.

11. Barbara Ehrenreich, "The New Right Attack on Social Welfare," in The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State, ed. Block, et. al., New York: Pantheon, 1987, pp. 161-193.

12. This phrase was suggested to me by Arthur Stinchcomb.

13. For an excellent discussion of neo-conservatism, cf. Helmut Dubiel, Was ist Neokonservatismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985.

14. Walter Lippman, quoted in Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, "What is the Public Interest?" The Public Interest, vol. 1, no. 1, 1965, p. 5.

15. Stephen Miller, Special Interest Groups in American Politics, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983, p. 145.

16. See, for example, Burton D. Sheppard, Rethinking Congressional Reform: The Reform Roots of the Special Interest Congress, Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Books, 1985. Burton frequently derides "the inchoate decision-making process of American politics."

17. Jimmy Carter, Public Papers: 1980-81, vol. III, p. 2890.

18. President Bush expressed this sentiment rather dramatically in his attempt to explain the budget debacle of October, 1990. He claimed that the blame ought to be pinned on "a Congress hog-tied by special interests wrangling over America's priorities." (ABC News, 27 October 1990)

19. Sullivan, op. cit., p. 215.

20. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 203.

21. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, Cambridge, MA., MIT Press, 1992.

22. Claus Offe, "Fessel und Bremse: moralische und institutionelle Aspekte »intelligente Selbstbeschränkung«," in Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozeß der Rationalisierung, ed. A. Honneth, T. McCarthy, C. Offe, A. Wellmer, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989; Jürgen Habermas, "Volkssouveränität als Verfahren: Ein normativer Begriff von Öffentlichkeit," Merkur, 43:6, June, 1989; Jürgen Habermas, "Nachholend Revolution und lenker Revisionsbedarf: Was heißt Sozialismus heute?" in Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine Politische Schriften VII, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990, pp. 179-204.

23. For further discussion of the nature of "needs-talk," see Nancy Fraser, "Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late Capitalist Political Culture," in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 161-187.

24. Jürgen Habermas, "Die Krise des Wohlfahrtstaates und die Erschöpfung utopischer Energien," Die Neue Unubersichtlichkeit: Kleine Politische Schriften V, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 160.

25. Claus Offe, "Fessel und Bremse," op. cit.

26. For suggestions, criticisms, and support during the preparations of this essay, I wish to thank Nancy Fraser, Arthur Stinchcombe, Pauline Kleingeld, Kirk Pillow, and participants in the CIRA conference,"Keywords of the Welfare State."