This is the first volume comprehensively to explore the dynamics of political interest groups in the twelve southern states – the types of group, lobbyists and lobbying tactics, state regulation of lobbying activity, and the power they exert in the individual states. The authors bring a new dimension to the study of southern politics, which traditionally has emphasized electoral politics and the politics of race, and their work underscores the pivotal, and at times controlling, role played by interest groups.
This is the first volume comprehensively to explore the dynamics of political interest groups in the twelve southern states – the types of group, lobbyists and lobbying tactics, state regulation of lobbying activity, and the power they exert in the individual states. The authors bring a new dimension to the study of southern politics, which traditionally has emphasized electoral politics and the politics of race, and their work underscores the pivotal, and at times controlling, role played by interest groups.
Interest Group Politics in the Southern States
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Overview
This is the first volume comprehensively to explore the dynamics of political interest groups in the twelve southern states – the types of group, lobbyists and lobbying tactics, state regulation of lobbying activity, and the power they exert in the individual states. The authors bring a new dimension to the study of southern politics, which traditionally has emphasized electoral politics and the politics of race, and their work underscores the pivotal, and at times controlling, role played by interest groups.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389048 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Ronald J. Hrebenar is professor of political science at the University of Kentucky and coauthor of The Legislative Process in the U.S. (4th ed.) and The Kentucky Legislature. Clive S. Thomas is professor of political science at the University of Alaska, Juneau, whose latest publication is Politics and Public Policy in the Contemporary American West (1991).
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Interest Group Politics in the Southern States
By Ronald J. Hrebenar, Clive S. Thomas
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1992 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8904-8
CHAPTER 1
UNDERSTANDING INTEREST GROUP ACTIVITY IN SOUTHERN STATE POLITICS
Clive S. Thomas
For much of this century, down to the 1960s, Texas politics was dominated by four powerful interests—oil, chemicals, railroads, and the Texas Manufacturers Association. The wheeler-dealer lobbyists who represented these Big Four interests used their tremendous influence to achieve purposes far beyond their clients' narrow policy goals. "They advocated the establishment's number one priority—a good business climate, which in those days meant weak unions, low taxes and minimum regulation." In other words, more than any other forces or facets of Texas life, the Big Four interests could largely determine what state government did or, more importantly, what it did not do.
Such a situation, with interest groups exerting a stranglehold on state politics, was common in many states during this period. But, largely because of the special circumstances of southern political life, interest groups played a crucial and in most cases a dominant role in all southern states with the possible exception of Virginia, although even in Virginia they were extremely influential. And the power of southern interest groups lives on today. In fact, in some respects their political significance is greater than ever. Interest groups have been such an important and dominant feature of southern politics for so long that studying their development and contemporary activities provides perspective both comprehensive and unique on past and present southern political life.
No life-style—particularly no political life-style—of any region of the United States has been the subject of more negative stereotypes than that of the American South. The South has been seen as racist and staunchly white supremacist; as backward, rural, poverty-stricken, and economically stagnant; as rife with demagogs and corrupt politicians; and as politically elitist and conservative to the extreme. Yet, and perhaps mainly because of these long-standing stereotypes, in the last thirty years the South has been the subject of a largely positive press. This is because the region has gone through some major, if often painful, changes that have brought its social, economic, and political system more in line with the rest of the nation.
Change—often fundamental change—has affected almost every aspect of southern life and culture. As one commentator put it, "the South has changed so much in the past decade or two that change itself has become Dixie's most identifiable characteristic." Volumes of writing, both popular and academic, have documented, traced, analyzed, and speculated about these changes. As integral and resilient features of southern life, interest groups have been both affected by this change and instrumental in helping bring it about.
Two words closely associated with change are transition and growth. Change inevitably produces a transition, whether to a less or more favorable state of affairs. By the standards of democratic theory, recent changes in interest group activity in the South have set in motion a largely positive transition. In Texas, for example, several groups not previously represented have entered the political fray in Austin, which in turn has challenged the power of the Big Four. Change does not necessarily produce growth; it might produce decline or contraction. In the recent history of southern interest group politics, however, change has very much been linked with growth. Once again, Texas is fairly typical. Here there has not only been a growth in the number of groups in Austin, but also in the strata of the population represented by interest groups, as well as a growth in the professionalism of lobbyists and group leaders. Explaining exactly what the nature of this change, transition, and growth has been in recent developments in southern interest group politics is our primary objective in this book.
To achieve this we combine an in-depth analysis of individual states with comparative analysis of the region as a whole. This involves four distinct but interrelated lines of inquiry. First, we provide an overview of the types of groups operating in each state and the tactics they are now using to achieve their goals. For several states this constitutes the first comprehensive treatment of interest groups past or present. Second, we assess changes in interest group politics in the South as a whole, especially in the role that groups play in the public policy-making process. Third, we place the South in context by comparing its past and present trends with those in other regions. Finally, by combining the findings from these three lines of inquiry we hope to enhance general theories of interest group activity in the states.
Most importantly, this first chapter sets out an analytical framework for understanding the changes, transition, and growth in southern interest group politics. We will review the existing state of knowledge on southern groups; briefly trace the development of groups in the South up until the 1970s, and the factors that have affected change; explain some key definitions and our methodology; and identify some recent changes in other regions as a means of assessing the developments identified by the authors of chapters on the individual states. However, neither in this chapter nor in this book do we claim to provide more than a cursory treatment of southern politics. We simply highlight those topics and themes that are essential for an understanding of southern interest group politics.
The South Defined
The South has long been considered one of the most distinctive of American regions, encompassing the eleven states of the Old Confederacy. This was the definition used by V. O. Key, Jr., in his 1949 classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation, and most subsequent academic treatments of southern politics have followed suit. There are, indeed, good arguments based on cultural, social, economic, and political factors for defining the South in this way. A case can be made, however, that recent changes have weakened the cohesiveness of this regional definition. Southern Florida, northern Virginia, and west Texas can justifiably be no longer considered as part of the South, if they ever were. On the other hand, parts of Maryland and West Virginia, the southern parts of Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois, eastern Oklahoma and most of Kentucky could easily be considered southern.
Furthermore, even within the traditional eleven-state region some distinct subregional patterns have long been identified, as well as intrastate regionalism. Distinctions have been made, for example, between the Upper South—North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee—and the Deep South—Arkansas (sometimes considered an Upper South state), Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. Exactly which category Texas fits, if either, has never been clear. Another, and more analytically sound, division is between the Deep South and the Peripheral South: Five states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) are classed in the first, and the remaining six in the latter category. As to intrastate divisions, within several southern states the division between the lowlands and the uplands dates back to colonial or territorial days.
Consequently, while the South is less amorphous a region than the West or the Midwest, scholars disagree over its extent. Faced with these problems, we settled on a definition of the South that includes the eleven states of the Old Confederacy plus Kentucky. Listed alphabetically these are:
Alabama
Arkansas
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
Louisiana
Mississippi
North Carolina
South Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Virginia
Our rationale for embracing these twelve within our definition is based on a combination of their distinctiveness and convenience of analysis. As most of the existing comparative data on southern politics use Key's definition, it was most logical to include these states for comparisons with our data. Kentucky was added because it is predominantly more southern than midwestern or northeastern in terms of its social, economic, and political variables. Maryland, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Missouri were excluded because they are not predominantly southern in these respects. In organizing the sequence of discussing these twelve states, we took the division of Peripheral and Deep South as being the one that best represents recent political developments in the region. However, as we will see throughout this book, the distinction between southern states in regards to their contemporary interest group systems is much less clear than in other areas of southern politics.
Southern Interest Groups: Research and Definitions
Despite the extensive literature on southern politics, very little material exists on southern interest groups. For very good reason, research on southern politics has followed the mold cast by Key over forty years ago. The bulk of research has focused on patterns of factionalism within the Democratic party, the rise of the Republicans, increased political participation by blacks, the effects of economic growth and changing demographics, and the South's role in national politics. Yet the South is not alone in its dearth of research on state interest groups; the bulk of research on interest groups in the United States has focused on group activity at the national level.
As to southern interest group politics specifically, until now no comprehensive comparative analysis has been produced. Seven types of studies have, however, treated—or more often touched on—some aspects of interest group activity in the South. First, at the most general level and written for a popular readership, there are books that have dealt with southern politics, and to some extent southern interest groups, as part of a general treatment of the life of the states. These include John Gunther's Inside USA and the series of books on the regions of the country by Neal R. Peirce. Despite their shortcomings, in the absence of comprehensive and comparative academic information scholars have often turned to these books to piece together an understanding of southern interest groups. In fact, Sarah McCally Morehouse used Peirce's books to put together the first list of the most effective groups in the fifty states.
The second category of literature on southern interest groups comprises academic works, books treating the government and politics of individual southern states, and books that include southern states as examples or case studies. While at some time all twelve states are written of in some text, the treatment of interest groups varies widely. Some researchers devote a separate chapter to interest groups, others do not. These authors also display a wide variety of approaches, from the purely anecdotal to the highly conceptual and quantitative. They also vary in scope and depth of treatment. Most such studies are now outdated. And while many chapters in books that include southern states as examples or case studies are well written, length limitations preclude their authors' paying more than cursory attention to interest groups.
Third, beginning with Key, scholars have to some extent treated interest groups in general texts on southern politics. Yet, as we mentioned above, these treatments have usually been only incidental. No book, for example, has analyzed the role that groups have played over the years in southern states' political systems.
Fourth, in more recent years books have been published on specific aspects of southern politics, whose authors have focused on or included treatments of particular interest groups in the South. Most notable is the series of books edited by Robert P. Steed, Tod A. Baker, and Laurence W. Moreland.
A fifth category includes a small body of literature that focuses on public policy in which researchers have taken a case-study approach to investigating the impact of individual groups. For example, several years ago Harmon Zeigler studied the impact of the Florida Milk Commission (which was controlled by the dairy interests) on milk prices in that state. More recently Joseph Stewart and James Sheffield studied the use of the courts by black interest groups in Mississippi.
In a sixth category of literature scholars have taken what might be termed a microapproach to the study of group theory, looking at either some specific aspect of the internal organization and operation of groups or at how they affect some specific part of the political process, such as the legislature. Sometimes these researchers have been concerned solely with specific states—for example, an early 1980s study of Arkansas lobbyists by Charles Dunn and Donald Whistler. Most often, however, those using this approach have taken one or more southern states as part of a larger study. Zeigler and Michael Baer, for example, used North Carolina as one of the four states in their study of lobbying in state legislatures; and Charles Bell, Keith Hamm, and Charles Wiggins used Texas in their recent three-state study of group impact on certain areas of public policy.
These six categories are a useful starting point in a study of southern interest groups, particularly group activity in individual states, and we will make numerous references to them throughout this book. Yet, because of their great variation in methodology and scope and depth of analysis, they are of very limited value for purposes of comparative analysis (and often for individual state studies). There is, however, a seventh category of literature, comparative in focus and including the southern states as part of nationwide studies of state interest group activity. Authors within this category have taken what we might term a macroapproach, attempting to understand interest groups in the context of the individual state and particularly in relation to that state's political and governmental systems. The most notable work here has been conducted by Belle Zeller, Harmon Zeigler, and Hendrik van Dalen, and by Sarah McCally Morehouse.
In none of these studies, however, have scholars conducted systematic research on all the southern states. Their attempts at comprehensive analysis of both the South and other regions are based upon original data from only a few states and draw on other information (such as that referred to above) that varies in its methodology from the impressionistic to the highly quantitative, a divergence that is not ideal for comparative analysis. The theories and propositions developed from these studies were thus arrived at by extrapolation, or by reliance on secondary sources, and sometimes, in the absence of data, through speculation. Yet these comments should not be interpreted as understating the significant contribution of these studies. Each was a major source for evaluating interest groups at the subnational level—including the South—at a time when little other data existed. Zeller was the first to categorize states into strong, moderate, or weak interest group systems. Zeigler, and Zeigler and van Dalen, developed several theories and propositions about how a state's economic, social, and political system influences the composition, operation, and power of the state's interest group system. Most notably they developed a four-category classification of group power within strong interest group states; and advanced knowledge on the relationship between party strength and group power. More recently Morehouse built on this work. In particular, she expanded on the relationship of parties and groups, and refined the threefold classification system (strong, moderate, or weak) of interest group power vis-à-vis a state's political system. And, as mentioned above, she developed the first listing of the most "significant" groups in all fifty states. All this has acted as a benchmark for scholars conducting subsequent research. It certainly provided our study with an important point of departure.
One of the problems that reduces the usefulness of existing studies of southern interest groups for purposes of comparative analysis, be this within a state over time or between states past or present, is the variation in definition of key terms. Five of the most important of these terms are interest group, interest, lobby, lobbyist, and group power. It is not surprising that scholars have used various definitions of these terms, whether explicitly or not, as disputes over their meaning have plagued the academic study of interest groups for years. Therefore, for the purposes of methodological and analytical consistency we developed definitions of these terms for use by our contributors in all fifty states. Here we will define the first four, leaving group power for later in this chapter when we explain our methodology in more detail.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Interest Group Politics in the Southern States by Ronald J. Hrebenar, Clive S. Thomas. Copyright © 1992 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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