Perspectives on pressure group activity

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  • Created by: Holly
  • Created on: 16-05-13 17:29

The Pluralist approach

Pluralists believe that groups are an entirely natural and healthy feature of political life. They believe groups benefit politics in these ways

  • Their concerns reflect those of ordinary people who were entitled to air their views
  • They provide informed views and specialist expertise to government
  • They allow minority voices to be clearly advanced, helping to acheive a necassary balance in a democracy between majority and minority rights.
  • They cater for a heterogeneos population
  • They prevent any single group from excersizing disproportionate influence due to the oppertunity for the existance of countervailing groups.
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The Corporatist approach

  • Corporatism is a means of bringing organised interests into the process of government.
  • Corporatists place greater emphasis on the close links that exist between certain types of group and the state, enabling manufacturing groups to have access to the government and assist in shaping and implementing policy.
  • Tripartism is where the state, employers and employees bargin about the conduct of economic and social policy.
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The New Right approach

  • Questions the values of groups in democratic life.
  • Portrays groups as sectional bodies wishing to advance their own interests rather than those of society.
  • They express alarm around the role and power of some groups.
  • Groups distorting the role of the executive and legislature?
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The Marxist approach

  • Draw attention to the unequal distribution of power between employers and employees, pointing out that buisness interests excersize excessive influence.
  • Employers control economic resources and posses status and access to government where worker's organisations do not have such power.
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