Lobbies and economic pressure groups

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Christophe
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Lobbies and economic pressure groups




by Christophe » 27/05/14, 15:37

Pharmaceutical lobby, environmentalist, Catholic… In France, interest groups have a bad reputation for historical reasons. In other countries, however, they are regarded as ordinary actors in political life, and the European Union immediately encouraged their action. What place do they occupy today in public decision-making processes?

What is an interest group?

"The tobacco lobby attacks elected officials", recently headlined Liberation about the actions carried out by tobacco companies and tobacconists following the publication of the report of a parliamentary mission which advocates a total ban on smoking in public places (1). The article described the multiple recipes that tobacco professionals use to try to influence future political decisions: invitation of deputies to Roland-Garros or to the football world at the expense of the French subsidiary of the company British American Tobacco (n # 2 worldwide with brands such as Lucky Strike, Peter Stuyvesant…), or canvassing of local elected officials with a reminder of the electoral “risks” that the application of such a measure would entail (“You were elected with 300 votes of Do you know that your region has 400 tobacco sellers? ”)…

This example sums up well the general vision that we have, in France, of interest groups - most often named by the rather derogatory term of "lobby", which originally designated the corridors or vestibules leading to the parliamentary assemblies , these antechambers of power where the representatives of interest could meet the elected officials. A lobby is generally perceived as the emanation of particular social groups (the pensioners' lobby) or, quite often, of industrial sectors (the pharmaceutical lobby), who would intervene directly with political leaders, by seduction or by threat, to defend their own interests, thereby opposing the general interest or preventing it from emerging.

If it is not necessarily false, this vision of interest groups as a shadow power is nevertheless biased. On the one hand, interest groups do not necessarily represent private interests. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or associations defending collective causes (Greenpeace, for example), can also be considered as interest groups. On the other hand, they do not necessarily seek to directly influence political powers, but can also target public opinion, or certain social groups. Their means of action are therefore not reduced to interpersonal contact with elected officials or the threat of electoral sanctions.

Behind the term interest groups hides a nebulous entity, which political science and sociology find it difficult to define precisely because it is in fact less a particular organizational structure than a role played by certain actors. at a certain time. The borders are particularly blurred with, on the one hand, social movements (strikers, demonstrators), the characteristic of which would be to be weakly structured over time, and, on the other, political parties, which are distinguished by the they participate in the conquest and the exercise of power. We can therefore consider that the ecological parties or the Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Tradition (CPNT) movement are examples of interest groups that have shifted into the political field. We can therefore define the interest group in two ways. In a broad sense, it is "an entity that seeks to represent the interests of a specific section of society in public space", in a narrower sense, it is "an organized organization that seeks to influence political powers in a direction favorable to its interest (2) ”.



Suite and source: http://www.scienceshumaines.com/lobbies ... 15032.html
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