Grant Jordan

This article asserts that the current ‘Double Devolution’ idea in the UK is part of a wider fashion in political architecture that generally sees the emergence of larger units. Simultaneously though there is a political need for gestures to smaller scale units and more deliberative procedures. The article argues that the Double Devolution concept simply ignores a rising volume of evidence that finds problems in operationalizing small-scale and deliberative ideas. Among other problems is the consequence that the resulting increased policy diversity is quickly labelled a ‘postcode lottery’. The article also reviews the deliberative literature to find serious questions raised about new biases that emerge in deliberative settings. Finally, the article adopts Hood’s work on cultural theory and public management to say that in fact evidence-based policy making may not be the norm - but policy selections reflect values and normative preferences.

This article contributes to the discussion of one component of the “crisis” in political participation by looking at (non‐) participation in groups. The starting point is that political science has a heavy gauge tool for accounting for such low inactivity – Olson’s ( 1965 Olson, M. 1965, 1971. The Logic of Collective Action, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar] ) free rider proposition. The article accepts the influence of Olson, but uses survey data to investigate whether non‐participation is a self‐interested strategy, as he suggests, or whether it reflects broader differences in resources and orientations to political action. While it is often assumed that surveys demonstrating that members join for collective ends “disprove” Olson’s thesis, this article accepts his rebuttal that these surveys of joiners tell us little about those who refuse to join. Olson accepted that (trivial) numbers of members would join (in addition to those seeking selective benefits), but argued that the number joining for collective goods would be dwarfed by those failing to participate. These he assumed to be free‐riding. This article revisits the definition, and supplies theoretically illuminating survey material from non‐members as well as members. The data show little support for the free‐riding instinct. While Olson implies that free‐riding is logical for almost all potential members, this article suggests that non‐participation is not simply a “leftover” from those not mobilized, but is itself based on specific factors.

This article looks at the emergence and maintenance of interest groups. We systematically identify a range of membership incentives that underpin mobilisation and apply them to a case study, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), focusing on the recruitment literature rather than the special niche literature on trade associations. The FSB was created in 1974 and membership was ‘flat’ at about 40,000 until recruiting method changes were introduced in the early 1990s. The total now approaches 200,000. This account of FSB recruitment argues unsurprisingly that the group resulted from a combination of diverse influences rather than the Truman type of ‘automatic’ mobilisation. More surprisingly, it notes that while early membership is accounted for by the perspectives of Truman, Salisbury, Wilson, Moe, Opp and Sabatier, the major increases of the past decade requires attention to the contribution of face-to-face marketing and Olsonian incentives. The FSB is an unusually good example of group entrepreneur activity that illustrates how entrepreneur incentives are different from those salient to members. Groups can experience different phases and forms as they grow. We exploit a ‘natural experiment’ by illustrating how the FSB addressed membership stagnation by changing the recruitment package in a broadly Olsonian direction. The ‘before and after’ patterns of recruitment allow a ‘test’ of these techniques. It also raises the issue of how different recruitment efforts produce a membership with different political characteristics.

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 Sartori's 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.

This case study charts the classic transformation of a small business organisation from being a vehicle of protest that attracted a reasonable but transient membership into a much larger group with a more stable membership and a group with an effective insider policy style. The paper asserts that the change in style and the change in recruiting success are not causally linked, and, indeed, it claims that an insider style may harm recruiting. In the case of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), however, any potential damage through adopting an insider style was more than offset by the separate decision to market the group door to door with a package of selective material incentives (Olson 1965). The paper describes the predominant insider politics style of political representation and finds that while the FSB has moved in that direction, it does not fully fit the stereotype. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications

This review finds little utility in Bentley's famous The Process of Government. It is asserted that his book is cited as a primary source of interest group writing, but in fact, the review argues, that this prominence is given mainly by those who want to criticise the interest group orientation. Critics commonly misinterpret the group approach as meaning that policy is the outcome of an interest group struggle: such critics seem to find in Bentley that banal and easily discredited position. The review argues that in fact Bentley's stress on group conflict was anything but coincident with interest group conflict. The charge is unfair on Bentley as it grotesquely simplifies his position and is unfair on the general interest group approach because that perspective is not adequately summarised by a distortion of Bentley. In contrast Truman's The Governmental Process is commended as raising issues that are strikingly contemporary.