Impacto

In the 1960’s, aggregative pluralism emerged as the dominant political theory, and it presently serves as the conventional theoretical model of Western liberal- democracies throughout the world (Mouffe 1999, 2000). As problems emerged in the

traditional elite model of democracy theory, aggregative pluralism (Schumpeter 1947; Dahl & Lindblom 1961; Cohen 1992) or interest group pluralism (Lowi 1965, Stewart 1975) was described as a decision-making that focused on political accountability to democratically order diversified interest groups and centers of power.

Democratic participation was limited, in this view, to the struggle between diverse, competing interest groups to reduce conflict and support political stability through bargaining and compromise. The public could “influence the political system through the articulation of interests that are aggregated by political parties and

legislatures and brought to bear on political decision-making” (Cohen & Arato 1992:19). This required a political structure with cross cutting interests, overlapping group

membership, and social mobility to guard against the permanent domination by any one group (Cohen & Arato 1992). “In the pluralist view, therefore, the overall public

interest lay not in delegating discretionary authority to administrative elites, but in making them more politically accountable” (Andrews 1999:219).

Based on Schumpeter’s democratic theory (1942) and Dahl and Lindblom’s "polyarchy" or "pluralist democracy” (1953, 1956, 1961), aggregative pluralism theorizes interest group representation as a mechanism to provide stability and efficiency. These theorists believed an ordered society was unattainable under either the traditional elite administrative models or more participatory forms of democracy. Instead, Dahl and Lindblom argued political competition among organized groups of citizens was best means of assuring responsive public policy (1953, p. 283).

Like elite theory, however, pluralists believed citizens should be restricted from directly participating (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee 1954: 312; Dahl 1956), and should instead, as Schumpeter famously described, be relegated to “institutional arrangements for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the peoples’ vote” (1950: 269). Pluralist theory emphasizes the aggregation of preferences that are negotiated by interest groups and representatives, and it limits citizen participation to either accepting or rejecting leaders through a competitive electoral process. Crystallized in his seminal 1942 work,

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter argued that groups or leaders—not individual citizens—best represented the general public interest by negotiating policy in open debate and elections.

Democracy, according to aggregative pluralists, is a process by which political representatives form constellations of interests that influence decision-making and compete for policy outcomes. This method mirrors the elite approach that strictly limits citizen participation to competition in elections, and instead relies on competition between interest groups and leaders to arrive at political compromises. Citizen

involvement under the pluralist model was limited to social clubs, church, volunteerism, and family to “deflect from political participation or activism on the part of the citizens” (Cohen & Arato 1992:19). Similar to studies perceived as validating democratic elitism theory (Stouffer 1955), pluralists pointed to empirical research in which voting patterns validated pluralist claims about individual participants as disinterested and inactive (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee 1954; Almond and Verba 1963; Milbrath and Goeld

1965), which required interest groups to counter-balance the longstanding dominance by powerful industries in agency decision-making.

Interest Group Representation

Under this new pluralistic model, competing powerful administrative elites were joined by interest groups in a form of decision-making where political parties appealed to a large diversity of groups to gain traction for politically accountable outcomes. Pluralists believed this would lead to a convergence of political coalitions around more moderate, stable polices while accommodating divergent interests. “These included the traditional industrial and resource extraction interests, but also, interestingly,

environmental protection activists who believed that only statutory mandates were strong enough to force agencies to stand up to powerful industrials” (Andrews 1999:219).

Powers traditionally held by technocratic agency experts were shared with interest groups who negotiated and bargained on behalf of the public or private interests to produce political compromises and balanced decision-making. As Stewart wrote in his seminal paper on the “reformation of American administrative law,” public interest groups “espouse the position of important, widely shared (and hence ‘public’) interests that assertedly have not heretofore received adequate representation in the process of agency decision. Such representation is wholly consonant with the pluralist vision of the collective welfare implicit in the expansion of the traditional model” (1970:1764). Ostheimer (1977:14) also identified the pluralistic emphasis as “a

overrepresentation of client and regulated interests by opening several opportunities for organized public interest groups.

Stewart identified this transformation of the traditional administrative process as a correction of the longstanding overrepresentation of private or client interests in agency decision-making. “If bias is attributable to imbalance in representation within the agency decision-making process, however, a seemingly more reliable antidote would be to provide more effective representation for unorganized ‘public’ interests” (Stewart 1975:1715). There is also criticism in the conservation literature about the tendency for commercial groups to benefit most by the Forest Service decisions (Bultena and John 1972; Robbins 1985; Clary 1986; Twight and Lyden 1990).

In A Lumberjacks and Legislators (1982) and American Forestry (1985), for example, historian William G. Robbins documented a longstanding “highly congenial relationship between the Forest Service and the commercial interests consuming national forest outputs.” And in Timber and the Forest Service, former Forest Service historian David Clary documented a strong timber production bias based on the agency’s historical goal of maximum commercial logging, and concludes that at "the wood chopper's voice will remain important, but someday it just might cease to be the dominant one in the Forest Service" (1986:199). In short, the Forest Service has traditionally favored resource extraction at the exclusion of ecological forestry (Hirt 1994; Hays 2007).

Recently, interest group pluralism has come under criticism as a democratic model for its failure to correct the overrepresentation of client-interests in agency

decision-making (Olson 1965; Parent 1992, Abel & Stephan 2000). Critics argue the pluralist model fails to incorporate individual citizens in agency decision-making to address imbalances in political and economic power (Schattsschneider 1952; McConnell 1966; Lindblom 1988). Pluralism displaces the legitimate right of independent citizens from participating in a “strong democracy” (Barber 1995; Steelman 1999; Abel & Stephen 2000) and fails to promote more democratic decision-making (Rawls 1971; Habermas 1975; Mouffe 2000). Critics believe persistent inequalities exist in favor of private interest groups, which dominated agency decision-making processes before the environmental era (Sax 1970, Stewart 1975, Hirt 1995, Abel & Stephen 2000). This is especially true for the Forest Service, which has consistently focused on commodity forestry since the 1940’s (Dana & Fairfax 1980; Twight 1983, Hays 2007).

Critics of aggregative pluralism point to its tendency to discourage popular participation, alienate citizens from mainstream political processes, and generate

excessively aggressive and destructive forms of expression (Rawls 1971, Habermas 1975, Mouffe 2000; Ackerman 2002). John Rawls, for example, saw the aggregative view as the source of disaffection with democratic institutions, arguing in A Theory of Justice (1971) that the dominance of interest group representation was producing a crisis of legitimacy affecting liberal democracies. Jürgen Habermas believed the aggregation of individual preferences, such as adding votes or referenda, was only sufficient for representing “mere agreement" instead of "rational consensus” (1990). The next section addresses more direct democratic models (deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism), which emerge from a long tradition of participatory democracy and are

presently involved in a debate in the literature over the most appropriate understanding of citizen in government decision-making.