1. How Do Interest Groups Influence Members Of Congress?

1) How do interest groups influence members of Congress? (Chapter 33)

Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America stated that Americans had a strong tendency for organizing private associations, which he declared were “schools for democracy”, since, they taught private individuals the skills of coming together for public purposes.

Tocqueville states that individuals by themselves are weak, but only by joining together for a common purpose could they resist tyranny. The same could be said in a democratic government. Interest groups undermine bureaucratic autonomy when they persuade their agents in

Congress to issue difficult and often self-contradictory mandates to agencies. Usually the exchange does not include money, but interest groups are able to influence

As a political scientist, Theodore Lowi declared

“pluralist” political theory in the mid-twentieth century agreed with Madison: the cacophony of interest groups would collectively interact to produce a public interest as competition in a free market would provide public benefit through individuals following their direct self-interest.

An argument against the interest groups and the pluralist view is that it sees public interest as the aggregation of individual private interest; they undermine the possibility of deliberation and the way that individual preferences are shaped by dialogue and communication. The most important argument against interest group pluralism has to do with distorted representation. E. E. Schattschneider, in The Semisovereign People, he declared that the actual practice of democracy in America had nothing to do with its popular image of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He stated that political outcomes rarely corresponded with popular preferences, that there is a very low level of participation and political awareness, and that real decisions are taken by much smaller groups of