What is a special interest? Why, it is an interest opposed to the “general interest” or collective will. But see items #2 and #3 above: There ain’t no such thing.
Special interests are labor and business. They are environmentalists and developers. They are pro-life and pro-choice activists. They are gays and they are fundamentalist Christians. They are you. They are me. It is hard to think of any political outcome that does not satisfy some interests and oppose others. Political scientists rarely talk about special interests. We used to use language like “interest-group pluralism” to describe the resulting political environment. The most important distinction in this world is not between special and general interests, but between organized interests (like unions, religious groups, and the NRA) and unorganized interests (like the unemployed or homeless). Today, many find “interest-group pluralism” to be an incomplete picture, because it does not capture the important role of political parties in managing these various groups (See, for instance, Cohen et al. 2008, Karol 2009). Yet the point remains: interests are just interests. They are not so special.
Read the whole piece, which is called “Ten things political scientists know that you don’t.” The quoted paragraphs are similar to what I often heard from my father, a political scientist. Thanks to a commenter on yesterday’s post on Ira Katznelson for the pointer.
Right. There are always a handful of poly sci professors doing interesting / useful work. Mostly these are some of the few more conservative or libertarian ones because they incorporate economic thinking. But this is like giving poly sci credit for Public Choice economists or someone like Hayek. It seems very unrepresentative of what goes on in most departments…
The vast majority of political scientists give the rest of them a bad reputation.
What’s funny is if you read it the title should be “Ten things that you ‘know’ that political scientists know that you don’t, because they don’t either.” That’s not snark, btw.
Noel characterizes the homeless and the unemployed as “unorganized” interest groups. With reference specifically to the homeless, there most certainly are organizations who purport to represent the interests of the homeless, and these organizations have been highly influential in the politics of large cities like NY for decades. Whether such organizations are really helping the homeless or are perpetuating them as a clientele and source of income (through government contracts) for their purported “helpers” is a different question.
Also, the point Noel seems to be making here is that calling an interest group a “special interest” implies a nonscientific normative judgment and thus should be banished from political discourse. However, his apparent position that we should judge all interests equally (weighted according to number, I suppose) is itself a nonscientific normative judgment. There is no way to discuss politics without involving nonscientific normative judgments. At some point, you have to define what constitutes a good outcome for the political process, and scientific methods are not much help with that. We can try to avoid overt discussion of moral and political philosophy, but we can’t escape moral and political philosophy.