Darren Halpin

Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions?

This article notes the systemic lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences and attempts to illustrate the adverse consequences by closer examination of the particular example of the interest group field. It indicates the significant ambiguities implicit in the term. Not all policy-influencing organisations are interest groups as normally understood, but because there is a lack of an appropriate label the term interest group is used by default. The article seeks to distinguish between interest groups and other policy relevant bodies—often corporations or institutions. It finds disadvantages in adopting a functional interpretation of the interest group term (i.e. any organisation trying to influence public policy). While the wider range of organisations are crucial in understanding the making of public policy, it is confusing to assume that this wider population are all interest groups. The article instead advances the complementary notions of pressure participant, policy participant and interest group. This slightly expanded repertoire of terms avoids conflating important distinctions, and, in Sartoris term permits ‘disambiguation’. The core assumption is that the search for comparative data and exploration of normative questions implies some harmonisation in the interest group currency.

Going organic : mobilizing networks for environmentally responsible food production

This book sets out to examine what really is going on in the organic sector socially and politically. In the process, it debunks a number of apparently common-sense beliefs: that organic consumers are wealthy environmental and health extremists; that growth in the industry will inevitably undermine its environmental values; that mainstream media is antagonistic to organics; and that the industry is driven by consumer demand. This book seeks to make a practical contribution to the development of more sustainable food systems by articulating what it takes to get people involved in organics at each stage of the food chain.

The Political Costs of Policy Coherence: Constructing a Rural Policy for Scotland

It is not hard to find the complaint that a group of policies are incoherent, operate in silos or are unintegrated. The aspiration to coherence is widespread across all political systems: it is todays idea in good currency. Scholarship has identified conditions that support coherence: a strong constituency with a shared policy image. This article confirms that these are vital sources of more or less coherence, but explores the question of whether more coherence in one area comes at the cost of incoherence elsewhere. Case study detail contrasts the Scottish Executives projection of a unified rural policy, with the reality of a persistent Scottish agricultural sector, with contending (multiple) publics with separate and often conflicting agendas: the case study found no unified policy community with shared perceptions. While a lack of coordination may simply be the manifestation of poor policymaking, this piece argues that in other cases the practical limitations on policy harmonization have to be acknowledged. Imperfectly coordinated rural policy may be inevitable as coordination in particular niches is often a casualty of competing priorities. This article argues against over ambitious expectations about the feasibility of integration. Accordingly it suggests that the project to rid policy practice of incoherence is too heroic: instead this article rediscovers the virtues of bargaining among informed and relevant participants, and incremental politics.

Deliberative Drift: The Emergence of Deliberation in the Policy Process

This article explores the issue of what we call “deliberative drift”: the emergence of deliberation in a non-deliberative setting. The literature on deliberative democracy has tended to focus upon practices taking place in specifically deliberative settings. We ask whether deliberation cannot logically occur elsewhere in the policy process, or, more specifically, can politics based on bargaining and aggregation be transformed (or drift) toward deliberative practice? In pondering this question, Habermass argument that a communicative rationality underpins deliberation is useful, as it demarcates deliberative from other practices by a willingness of participants to cast aside fixed preferences. While procedures and institutional designs are inflexible, the orientations or rationalities of individuals may be much more malleable. We explore one empirical case in which what started as negotiating and instrumental processes drifted toward a deliberative practice. We speculate that the rationalities that participants bring to their interaction, and the ways in which those rationalities change with the development of trust between participants, are as important in determining whether deliberation occurs as is the setting within which the interaction takes place.

Interpreting Environments: Interest Group Response to Population Ecology Pressures

Important articles in this Journal by Nownes in 2004 and Nownes and Lipinksi in 2005 demonstrate that ‘population ecology’ approaches are now central to interest group studies. Partly at least this move to study at population level is a consequence of the numbers of such organizations. Party scholars typically deal with far fewer cases and sui generis discussion is more defensible. Ecology seems to offer a ‘handle’ on the thousands of cases that exist in the interest group field. Nownes and Lipinski stressed the importance of environmental factors in determining group populations, and challenged group scholars to address the dynamics among interest group populations. This article argues that animal-based population ecology may be an imperfect analogy to use in making sense of group circumstances. It considers the way groups respond to opportunities and constraints. Pursuing Nownes and Lipinski’s invitation to look at dynamics in particular settings, this article stresses the ‘shaping’ roles of group leaders through an exploration of the way the dominant Scottish farming group mediated the impact of external changes over the past decade. It concludes that while approaches based on population ecology rightly emphasize system implications of competition for scarce resources in creating group challenges, the manner in which particular organizations adapt and transform is crucial. Mortality is not inevitable. This article thus builds on those elements within the ecological tradition that accept a place for agency. Ideas such as ‘mortality anxiety’, as used by Gray and Lowery, 1 or ‘survival tactics’, discussed by Imig, 2 show that biological models do not make straightforward metaphors for understanding human-engineered structures.

Explaining breadth of policy engagement: patterns of interest group mobilization in public policy

How broad do groups spread their engagement across the spectrum of public policy issues? The orthodoxy for some time has been that groups tend to focus their engagement rather narrowly. Some suggest that groups shy away from competition and pursue niche-seeking behaviour. Others argue that resource limitations constrain both the monitoring behaviour of groups and the extent to which groups can engage in policy influence activity. While there is some consensus that groups tend to specialize, there is not a great deal of work that seeks to explain it. To date this question has tended to be explored using survey data alone, which provides generalized findings about ‘interest’ in policy areas. In this article we go one step further. By linking detailed survey data with the actual policy activity data of interest groups, we investigate the factors that shape the breadth of engagement by interest groups.

Generating Policy Capacity in Emerging Green Industries: The Development of Organic Farming in Denmark and Australia

In many cases, when governments commit themselves to green policy targets, they also imply the development of ‘green’ industries to reach those targets. But, how do governments foster the development of such industries? This is particularly relevant because such industries are often in a very early stage of their evolution. Taking the case of organic farming, we argue that the states ability to foster ‘policy capacity’ is critical to the emerging development trajectories of such industries. Focussing on the states ability to generate policy capacity in the Danish and Australian organic food sector, this article suggests that policy capacity develops as a result of high levels of state and associative capacity and the ability to create conditions favourable for corporatist deliberation. The comparative study undertaken demonstrates that these conditions are met in the Danish case, resulting in a high level of policy capacity. By contrast, Australia suffers from a low level of policy capacity as a result of low state and associative capacity and lack of corporatist deliberation.

Images of an unbiased interest system

ABSTRACT Since political scientists were introduced to the concept of ‘the scope and bias of the pressure system’ by Schattschneider more than half a century ago, we have grappled with the lack of a standard against which to assess bias. Still, scholars have continued to address Schattschneiders provocative claim. This means that they must have in their minds at least implicit images of the unknown state of an unbiased interest system. We uncover these implicit images in this analysis both for their own intrinsic interest and perhaps as a foundation for more progressive research on biases in interest representation. Ten scholars who have done considerable work on the politics of interest representation were asked to provide a brief description of what he or she would see as an unbiased interest system. After presenting each, we summarize the themes that emerged and discuss possible avenues for empirical research on bias.

Interest-group capacities and infant industry development: State-sponsored growth in organic farming

Both interest-group and public-policy scholars accept that groups are important to policy formulation and implementation because they hold valuable capacities. However, the literature has not dealt with whether, and how, groups develop capacities. In this article, we examine the question of group capacity development by focusing on the adaption of specific groups to evolving policy contexts. Taking the example of organic farm policy we look at the impact that divergent policy strategies aimed at growing this infant industry sector have had on the way related industry groups have evolved in four countries. This comparative study supports our argument that policy strategy is one key force in shaping the capacities that groups develop over time.

Attributions of Responsibility: Rural Neoliberalism and Farmers' Explanations of the Australian Rural Crisis

Abstract Many farmers struggle to maintain farm viability amidst the ongoing commitment to a trade liberal paradigm in Australian agricultural policy. Significantly, governmental neoliberal discourses insist on Australian farmers taking personal responsibility and control for any socio-economic hardship or farm viability problems they face and down play structural explanations. In this article we argue that the neoliberal discursive environment creates the potential for self-blame where farmers ‘fail’. To investigate this argument, open-ended responses from a survey of farmers in a NSW rural local government area were examined using coding categories of attribution theory from social psychology. The analysis identifies how individual farmers have borrowed from these discourses and the extent to which the attributions these discourses encapsulate are replicated, transformed or contested. Areas for future research, including impacts of attributions on psychological health and political mobilisation, are discussed.