Interest Groups,Political Communication,and Jeffrey Alexander’s Sociology of Power

Power

In their new article, Gilens and Page (2014) mention a concept—a famous metaphor—that has been rattling around political science for 50 years: the “faces of power.” Are there two faces of power? Three? Four? Many? Debate over the “faces of power” has long been commonplace in political science, as scholars have worked to broaden and deepen their understanding of one of their discipline’s most important subjects. The terminology, if not the debate itself, dates to 1962 with the publication of an article titled “Two Faces of Power” by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962). In their analysis, the first face of power is the most obvious and overt: Actor A wins out in a contest with Actor B in a policy arena. Bachrach and Baratz, however, describe a more subtle second face of power: Actor A wins by keeping an issue out of a policy arena. They called this “nondecision-making” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1963). It has also been called “agenda building” or “agenda denial.” Then there is a third face of power, according to Steven Lukes (1974): A wins out over B by shaping B’s perceptions and beliefs, such that B willingly chooses, against his own interests, the policy preferences of A. This is similar to what Antonio Gramsci and his 1960s New Left followers called “hegemony.” All three of these “faces of power” involve intention, observable behavior, and causation (Hayward & Lukes, 2008; Wartenberg, 1990).

But perhaps yet another level or two of subtlety can be added: a fourth face of power (Digeser, 1992). Influenced by the “linguistic turn” in postmodern philosophy and the “social constructionist” turn in the social sciences, some political scientists moved the debate away from intention and behavior toward culture and social structure (Hayward, 1998, 2000). Jeffrey Isaac (1987), for example, uses the example of slavery. To a behavioralist, it may seem obvious that a master has power to “cause” the actions of a slave. But it is not so simple, says Isaac: “It is not the behavior of the slave that is caused by the behavior of the master; rather, the master-slave relationship is the material cause of the behavior of both the master and the slave” (pp. 85–86). In a nice overview, using the example of education, he adds:

Rather than A getting B to do something B would not otherwise do, social relations of power typically involve both A and B doing what they ordinarily do. The structure of education, not teachers, causes students to act like students and teachers to act like teachers. Teachers and students, as the social identities that they are, would not “otherwise do” anything but what teachers and students tend to do. And neither a conflict of revealed preferences, nor objective interests, must be discovered in order to attribute power to these roles. (Isaac, 1987, p. 96)

Is Jeffrey Alexander’s civil sphere about power in any of these forms? I believe it is: It is about the third face of power. The civil sphere is a public space defined by a society’s shared civic language and values. These are values that might be called hegemonic. To be part of the civil sphere, social actors must speak its language, says Alexander. Some are in; some are out. Some civil, some uncivil. Although he is reluctant to use the language of power, Alexander certainly implies that power—the hegemonic power of definition and legitimation—is involved. He writes:

Actors are not intrinsically either worthy or moral: they are determined to be so by being placed in certain positions on the grid of civil culture. When citizens make judgments about who should be included in civil society and who should not, about who is considered a friend and who an enemy, they draw on a systematic, highly elaborated symbolic code. (Alexander, 2006, p. 55)

Alexander’s phrase “they are determined to be so” suggests intent and behavior, not only by the members of civil society but also by those outsiders who seek admission to it and who sometimes seek to change it. Civic values may be shared and consensual, but how they are applied is not. The boundary between the civil and the uncivil is policed and contested. “Actors struggle to taint one another with the brush of repression and to wrap themselves in the rhetoric of liberty,” he writes. “The general discursive structure, in other words, is used to legitimate friends and delegitimate opponents in the course of real historical time” (Alexander, 2006, pp. 34–35, 64–65). This is where organized interest groups come in. They may choose—they often do choose—to go public and define themselves in the language of civic virtue. But not always. They may choose a very different vocabulary. Why might that be so? Political scientists answer that question better than Alexander does.

Interest Groups

Alexander labels interest groups as “civil” or “noncivil” (sometimes “uncivil” or “anticivil”) based mainly on their rhetoric. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, counts as civil, while the Girl Scouts and the PTA, though splendid organizations, do not count as civil because they “do not project communicative judgments in the wider civil sphere” (Alexander, 2006, p. 5). In other words, a group is civil if it speaks and acts civilly—that is, if it employs the language of the civil sphere and presents its own values as universal values of civility. Several hundred pages of The Civil Sphere explore three historical case studies (mostly American) of the process through which a movement became part of the civil sphere: women, African Americans, and Jews. In each case, a population of noncivil (even despised) outsiders managed to construct themselves as civil by adopting the hegemonic discourse of civil society (Alexander, 2006, p. 233).

Alexander certainly considers this process, which he calls “incorporation,” to be a conscious exercise of something akin to power, even though he shies away from the word “power.” He prefers “influence and persuasion” (Alexander, 2006, p. 294). But in side stepping the concept of power and in classifying groups and their actions as “civil” or “noncivil,” Alexander (2006) argues that the civil sphere is an independent realm different from ordinary politics:

Civil society is conceived here as a sphere or subsystem of society that is analytically and, to various degrees, empirically separated from the spheres of political, economic, family, and religious life … It is both a normative and “real” concept. (p. 53)

It seems to me, however, that the stories Alexander tells about groups seeking incorporation into civil society are about power and politics pretty much as usual—that is, just as those concepts are understood in political science. The methods of influence and persuasion used by the groups in Alexander’s case studies are simply political tactics, not distinctive markers of civility. This, I believe, is the lesson of the “faces of power” debate.

Interest-group politics lie at the heart of the “faces of power” idea, and a key founding text is E. E. Schattschneider’s The Semisovereign People (1960). Everyone (except Jeffrey Alexander) cites Schattschneider, especially these famous sentences:

All forms of political organization have a bias in favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias. Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out. (Schattschneider, 1960, p. 71)

Another key sentence is this one: “The most important strategy of politics concerns the scope of conflict” (Schattschneider, 1960, p. 3). From these ideas flow streams of research on the “faces of power” (Hayward, 2000; Wartenberg, 1992), nondecision-making (Bachrach & Baratz, 1963), agenda building (Cobb & Elder, 1983; Kingdon, 1984), agenda denial (Cobb & Ross, 1997), interest-group organization (Berry, 1984; Loomis, 2012; Schlozman & Tierney, 1986), and, most recently, agnotology—that is, the strategic manufacture of public ignorance (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008).

The “scope of conflict” is a very useful concept. In a political system such as the one in the United States, powerful interests can usually keep the scope of conflict very narrow. If issues need to be made public at all, these interests seek to limit decision making to a few sympatico government institutions, such as executive departments, regulatory commissions, and congressional subcommittees. The rhetoric of debate is the arcane jargon of technical expertise, which the public cannot understand. Think banking, for example. At the other extreme, groups without insider access seek to expand the scope of conflict, perhaps to include the general public (Cigler & Loomis, 2011; Schlozman, Verba, & Brady, 2012). In Schattschneider’s (1960) words, “It is the weak who want to socialize conflict, i.e., to involve more and more people in the conflict until the balance of forces is changed” (p. 40). For them, the rhetoric of debate will be the language of broad public values. It will be, to use Jeffrey Alexander’s vocabulary, the discourse of the civil sphere.

My aim here is not to dispute Jeffrey Alexander’s historical accounts of how some interests in America—women, African Americans, and Jews—were incorporated into civil society. (Some reviewers, though, have attacked Alexander’s histories [Goldberg, 2007; Morris, 2007; Wolfe, 2007].) Rather, my aim is to suggest that what he describes as the civil sphere is simply part of politics as usual, not a realm separate from politics. His stories are about strategies and tactics of power. Groups seek to constrict or expand the scope of conflict—that is, to particularize or to universalize their interests, to use Alexander’s terms—not because their aims are civil or uncivil but because they want to win the political game. It is tactical. And utterly political. To portray the civil sphere as independent of the political sphere is to misunderstand the subtleties of political power and to misconstrue the behavior and rhetoric of interest groups. The political science that Jeffrey Alexander leaves out of The Civil Sphere is more complex and compelling than he seems to believe.

Political Communication

Although he concedes that the civil sphere is largely a discursive construction, Alexander insists that it is filled with real social institutions as well. Some of these are what Alexander calls “communicative institutions,” notably mass media, opinion polls, and certain interest groups. They police the symbols and manage the discourse of civil society. Because Alexander sees the civil sphere as an independent social realm, he does not label what they do “politics” or what they say “political communication.” But I will argue that there is something to be gained—not lost—by viewing these institutions as thoroughly embedded in politics and political communication. Here, I will talk about interest groups and journalism.

Alexander is correct to include interest groups alongside journalism and other media as important purveyors of public information, interpretation, and civic symbolism. But in Alexander’s analysis, only some interest groups count as “civic associations” or “issue-oriented associations.” The key markers are (a) “outward civic orientation” and (b) “communicative form” (Alexander, 2006, p. 105). In other words, “they must [my emphasis] direct their particular interests outward into the broader network of solidarity ties and claims” (Alexander, 2006, p. 104). Alexander develops this theme in each of his case studies.

The process that Alexander describes is what Schattschneider and his successors in political science have called “expanding the scope of conflict.” A related term is “agenda building.” For example, in the language of Roger Cobb and Charles Elder (1983), groups who seek to place their issues on the “formal agenda” of government sometimes work first to shape the “systemic agenda” of the broader public—what Alexander calls the civil sphere. But not always and not necessarily. While Alexander labels groups as either civil or noncivil based on their civic rhetoric, scholars of interest groups tend to see rhetoric as a political tactic, not as a substantive attribute of the group. Alexander is properly alert to this one particular way of doing politics in America and to the important role that political communication plays. But categorizing (even valorizing) a group as “civil” on the basis of the political tactics and language it sometimes uses seems misleading and unhelpful.

Some of Alexander’s own examples suggest the problem of labeling some groups “civil associations” and some not civil based on the language they use. Early in the book, for instance, he discusses the politics of health-care reform in 1993–1994. As powerful insiders, medical and insurance associations had traditionally sought to narrow the scope of conflict in the realm of regulatory politics—that is, to keep medical policy-making off the public agenda entirely or at least behind closed doors. As health-care reform gained traction in the early years of the Clinton presidency, however, these associations saw the need to expand the scope of conflict to a wider public. Predictably, the arcane vocabulary of technical expertise was jettisoned in favor of a more popular vocabulary of liberty and choice versus coercion and bureaucracy. As Alexander (2006) puts it, “they entered communicatively into the civil sphere” (p. 96). These trade groups became “civil associations.” But after health-care reform failed in 1994, these same associations retreated to their board rooms, to the lobbies of regulatory agencies, and to the offices of K Street fixers. They resurrected the vocabulary of expertise, once again restricting the scope of conflict and playing the insider game of agenda denial and nondecision-making. Did they thereby become “uncivil”? That is not clear in Alexander’s analysis. He concedes that “oscillating” (his term) “between particular interests and cultural coding” is often what civil associations do (Alexander, 2006, p. 96). Still, I am not persuaded that “naming” (his term) certain groups “civil associations” and differentiating them from the “more general category of ‘voluntary associations’” on the basis of the tactical political language they only sometimes use helps explain the nature of political, economic, or social power.

Although interest groups use different vocabularies to constrict or to expand the scope of conflict for practical political reasons, another key communicative institution—journalism—does not play this linguistic game. By its nature, journalism is always public. Its business is publication—that is, making things public—which necessarily means expanding the scope of conflict. Alexander is correct to portray journalism as an important mediator of the codes and canons of civil society. On the other hand, journalism is more enthralled in the politics of power and considerably less professionally autonomous than Alexander seems to believe. Of the news media, Alexander (2006) declares: “they control … vital interpretative tasks” (p. 81). In fact, they do not.

Alexander describes the practice of journalism as “something to be sociologically understood,” and he frequently draws on the work of historical sociologists who care about journalism, such as Michael Schudson (1998) and Paul Starr (2004). His application of sociological concepts such as “typification” and “framing” to journalism is apt. But when he turns to a consideration of the professional norms of journalism, he depends too much on the writings of journalists themselves. On “objectivity,” he cites the critic David Shaw (Alexander, 2006, p. 83); on “journalism’s professional commitment to truth telling,” he cites reporters such as Claude Sitton, John Herbers, David Halberstam, and so on (Alexander, 2006, pp. 296–300). Missing from Alexander’s impressive compilations of endnotes and bibliography is all of the classic mass communication research on journalism organization and professional practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars who studied journalism, like their colleagues in political science, began to take seriously the subtleties of power, especially organizational power. Since the late 19th century, journalists themselves had declared independence to be a fundamental tenet of their professional creed. For them, a corollary to independence was objectivity: a separation of facts from values and a commitment to reporting the facts without fear or favor. By the 1970s, an outpouring of mass communication research had largely debunked journalists’ claims to independence and objectivity as self-serving myths of the profession (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). The findings were stark and deeply critical: Despite its lofty ideals, journalism in practice is almost always simple “source reporting.” Journalists’ sources, not journalists themselves, choose the day’s news, provide the facts, and shape the frames and the typifications; objectivity means little more than the accurate quotation of sources. Mass communication scholars differed on just how fully dominated by their sources journalists are. Do journalists dance with their sources, usually following but sometimes leading? Or do they merely take dictation? Are they always just ventriloquists’ dummies? Or are they sometimes the ventriloquists themselves, speaking through their sources? Yet despite some difference in emphasis (and in critical vitriol), all of these now-classic studies of journalistic practice tend to agree on the central point that journalism is enmeshed in a power structure that it does not control (Altschull, 1984; Bennett, 1983; Fishman, 1980; Gandy, 1983; Gans, 1980; Gitlin, 1980; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Sigal, 1973; Soley, 1992; Tuchman, 1978). None of these studies—or others like them—appears in The Civil Sphere.

The research on source reporting is important because it connects journalism to the political science scholarship on interest groups and power. Journalists’ main sources are government officials, but interest groups are ubiquitous sources as well. Groups often do politics via the care and feeding of journalists. Jeffrey Alexander understands this relationship but only in one form: For him “civic associations” must seek to expand the scope of conflict, which means they must align themselves with the civic values and language of journalism, a key “communicative institution” of the civil sphere (Alexander, 2006, pp. 294–295). Well, yes, sometimes they do, but sometimes they do not. This is the essence of my argument about group politics. All interest groups, not just corporate trade associations, engage or disengage from civic discourse as a political tactic. Even so-called “public interest” associations retreat from journalism into the vocabularies of law, science, and regulatory expertise when they feel the need to narrow the scope of conflict. In other words, for interest groups, rhetoric is all politics all the time. Furthermore, the values and language of journalism are themselves the product of official sources and powerful interest groups anyway.

Alexander’s critics have charged that his case studies, especially his history of the civil rights movement in the postwar American South, are too media-centric: They need more attention to real politics and “instrumental power” (Morris, 2007, pp. 616–618). But in fact the problem is not the need for more attention to politics instead of the media. What is needed is more attention to politics within the media.

History

History is a discipline of contingency—of accident and fortune. Jeffrey Alexander understands this, and his case studies of women, Jews, and African Americans are rooted in “real space” and “real time.” Although the civil sphere is in a sense normative and utopian, he says, “every civil society has actually been founded by some particular persons at particular historical times” (Alexander, 2006, p. 199). But contingency—the notion that history could have been otherwise—can be a problem for social theory, especially grand theory such as Alexander’s. The three histories that constitute more than half of The Civil Sphere do illustrate Alexander’s central theme: the incorporation of out-groups into “the wider solidarity that is the sine qua non of civil life” (Alexander, 2006, p. 7). They fit his theory, and they nurture his liberal hopes for progress toward “the utopia of a truly civil solidarity” (Alexander, 2006, p. 550). But these histories are particular stories about particular people and places, mainly 20th-century America. History could have been—it often has been—otherwise. For understanding the complex history of interest-group politics and political communication, as well as the relationship between interest groups and journalism, the political science perspective on power and the mass communication perspective on source reporting may be more versatile and more compelling.

What might such a history look like? First, any study of interest-group power must pay close attention to discourse. Alexander is right about that. The discourse that a group employs may be expansive, universal, and civic, as in Alexander’s case studies; or it may be otherwise. Discourse is a political tool. What a group says offers clues to its political strategy at that moment, whether it is seeking to expand or contract the “scope of conflict,” as E. E. Schattschneider (1960) described it. Although politics in America has always been driven by interest aggregation and association, the formal organization and proliferation of interest groups took off in the 20th century, as did their adoption of systematic, strategic communication (Berry, 1984). Many histories of how this process worked could be told and have been told (Cigler & Loomis, 2011; Loomis, 2012). The communication history of religious interest groups is the one I will dip into here.

For example, the rise of conservative evangelical political action in the 20th century offers an especially interesting glimpse into how interest groups have tailored their rhetoric to achieve different political goals in different political eras—or sometimes different goals simultaneously. Standard textbook histories portray evangelical conservatives as forcefully seeking to influence politics and civil society in the early 20th century, then retreating into their own churches and institutions after the debacle of the Scopes trial of 1925, then reemerging as a political and civic force after the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, and finally achieving mainstream civic status during the Reagan years (Corbett, Corbett-Hemeyer, & Wilson, 2014; Fowler, Hertzke, Olson, & Dulk, 2014; Smidt, Kellstedt, & Guth, 2009). Even this standard account illustrates how groups over time have fashioned and refashioned themselves as “civil” or “noncivil” as part of their political strategies. But an outpouring of recent historical scholarship on religious conservatism in American civic life has deepened and complicated the story considerably (Balmer, 2010; Marsden, 2006). Now, it seems, religious conservatives in the 20th century never quite retreated from the public square; they just operated in different ways with different constituencies. For example, the National Association of Evangelicals (founded 1942) spoke a variety of political languages tailored to different audiences, ranging from lobbying the Federal Communications Commission on radio policy, to recruiting constituent denominations, to wooing the Republican Party, and to saving souls (Williams, 2010). Sometimes their strategy was to expand the scope of conflict; sometimes to narrow it. Was the NAE a “civil” or a “noncivil” association? I fail to see how that question can lead to a subtle understanding of political strategy and political communication. The political science perspective on interest-group power may be the better guide.

As part of their political strategy, religious groups also have sought to influence mainstream journalism. Most studies of religion and journalism have focused on religion in the news, on religious groups’ own media, or on the religious values of journalists (Hoover, 1998, 2006; Meyer & Moors, 2006; Sloan, 2000; Stout, 2012; Winston, 2012). But another part of the story, especially in 20th-century America, is the formal organization of press bureaus by church denominations and religious associations designed specifically to shape news and commentary in the mainstream media. In other words, they set themselves up as formal journalistic “sources.” Only a few historians, notably John Ferré (1993, 2000), have explored this realm of interest-group communication. While Ferré describes the efforts of religious press bureaus to place positive news about their groups into the newspapers, I have discovered in my own research instances of religious press bureaus in the early 20th century working to keep negative news out of the newspapers (Nord, 2008). In both cases—whether getting on the agenda of journalism or staying off of it—the language used by press bureaus and religious PR men was typically the vocabulary of professional journalism: fresh news, human interest, factual accuracy, fairness, balance, and so forth. So, did these press bureaus become “civil associations,” deploying the rhetoric of the civil sphere? Sometimes, yes, but sometimes, no. It is more to the point to see them as political operatives employing whatever rhetoric they believed would work.

In the end, then, Jeffrey Alexander’s case studies are histories of one style of interest-group political action and political discourse: expanding the scope of conflict. There are other styles. And there are other histories worth pursuing. For historians of journalism, the study of interest-group communication is crucial because doing politics via journalism—facts and spin, agenda setting, and agenda denial—has been a key element of interest-group power in America for a very long time, but especially over the last century.

Political Power, Journalism, and the Civil Sphere

Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere is a massive tome, with hundreds of pages of text, notes, and bibliography. It is an astonishing intellectual achievement, in its way. It encompasses multitudes. Yet, it is curiously narrow in its portrayal of political power and journalism. Over the past 50 years, scholarship in political science and mass communication has been remarkably attentive to the subtleties of power. Alexander ignores this research; indeed, he is skeptical of the term “power” itself. But, in the end, perhaps it is not the book that is narrow; perhaps it is the civil sphere itself. Perhaps the civil sphere is—and has been, historically—just one part of politics rather than a separate and independent social realm. Jeffrey Alexander sees the civil sphere as largely constructed in discourse. Perhaps the civil sphere is only that: discourse. Because it is revealed in the language used by groups and institutions from other social spheres when they do politics, the civil sphere might be best thought of as simply a political vocabulary—an important vocabulary, but a vocabulary nonetheless.