We’ve all seen it somewhere. Whether it be a high school parking lot, a dive bar in the rough part of town, or an upper-middle-class subdivision, there are fights everywhere. Some of these feature two fairly evenly-matched individuals, say two freshmen who feel the need to prove their manhood by shoving each other until an assistant principal tells them to stop. Sometimes, though, the fight escalates. If a middle school student tries to take the lunch money of a 4th grader, for example, the 4th grader may decide that rather than be pummeled by a much larger foe, it would be smarter to call in reinforcements in the form of an older brother. Then, using a similar calculus, the middle school student will call in his older brother, who happens to be an all-state wrestler. Then, the first older brother decides he might need some reinforcements, so he gets a friend or two to come along. The wrestler sees this, and knows he can’t take on three people, so he brings a few other wrestlers. And so on, and so on. Before long, the entire city is standing on opposite sides of the 50 yard line because one 7th grader forgot his lunch money.

OK, this is probably an extreme example. (Well, except for the “probably” part.) However, it highlights an interesting political phenomenon. When you expect to lose a political fight, the best recourse is often to increase its scope, bringing in more people sympathetic to your cause. The seminal work here is probably Schattschneider. (1960) Schattschneider, in addition to having one of the most fun names in all of political science, wrote about public and special interests in The Semi Sovereign People. He goes well beyond what I’m laying out here, and I highly recommend the book to anyone who isn’t in a political science program but wants to read classic pieces of political work from the 1960’s. That’s kind of a small group, so but is the group of folk who read these pages, so I figure I’ll just throw that recommendation out there. It’s worth a couple of bucks at a used bookstore, if you can find it.

That was in my reading list this week, and as I read it, I couldn’t help but think of the health care debate. In Schattschneider’s terms, the health care industry is a special interest. That can be a loaded term, so I should stop to define it. Special interest groups are organizations whose membership is contingent upon belonging to another group. Unions and professional organizations are good examples. Presumably, when lawyers, doctors, or contractors get together to discuss their policy interests, they are examining which policies would benefit lawyers, doctors, or contractors, not society as a whole. The latter benefit would be nice, too, but it’s a secondary consideration. The Lawyer and Doctor groups would be more interested in lobbying on the details of tort reform than, say, aid to developing nations. This doesn’t make them bad people, just self-interested. Please don’t misconstrue this as an effort to crucify one interest for the benefit of another. One could easily plug the local PTA into the above example.

This is in contrast to public interest groups. These groups are open to anyone. Good examples might include the ACLU or NRA. While there is still a specific policy interest, the goal is a general benefit, not a specific one. One need not expect to be executed for his/her political beliefs in order to join Amnesty International.

With these definitions and the earlier framework in place, consider two situations. In the first, a special interest is winning. In the case of the health care debate, we can see hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, individual doctors, and insurance companies “winning.” They are performing the service they set out to perform, doing it reasonably well, and being paid very well for it. Some individuals are having great difficulty with this system, being forced to wade through a maze of insurance paperwork to cover the soaring costs of medical care. These individuals are “losing.” (Use of asinine air quotes here is meant to highlight the fact that I’m oversimplifying things. A lot. My interest is in the debate itself, not which side is actually right. Feel free to write angry comments below, but know that you’re not going to wound my very soul with them.) It is in the interest of the medical industry to keep this conflict small. Sure, the current system isn’t perfect, and they’re missing out on some customers/patients because of high prices, but the industry is doing well, and would like to be left alone. Public advocates, however, see a public that is currently “losing,” by way of paying too much for health care and/or dying.

There is little that even a very large group of citizens can do alone. Storming the proverbial Bastille isn’t exactly an option, and the old capitalist saw of “voting with one’s feet” isn’t really practical when it comes to health care. The only remaining solution is to expand the scope of the conflict, allowing in more powerful actors sympathetic to the cause of these public advocates. In this case, the solution is to lobby for government intervention.

In short, large industries are too powerful for groups of citizens to take on without some sort of government intervention. Of course, the first criticism of such a statement is that citizens probably shouldn’t be too concerned with toppling large industries. After all, capitalism has been pretty good to us. While I wouldn’t completely agree with such an argument, a clarification is in order. I am not talking about putting hospitals and doctors out of business. To the contrary, our hypothetical group of citizens wants to use the services of these hospitals and doctors and is unable to do so. Achieving this goal, however, requires a change in the balance of power in the conflict.

At the same time, Schattschneider’s model in its most basic form predicts that those in the industry will try to keep the scope of the conflict as small as possible. This isn’t exactly what they have done; industry groups have argued that the American health system will fail if government involvement becomes the norm, that socialized medicine will destroy what we have built, etc. etc. etc. Schattschneider comments that special interests are likely to claim frame their arguments in terms of public goods when addressing public audiences. This does not mean that such claims should be ignored. It stands to reason that those in an industry will know it at least as well as those outside of it. Given that such groups aren’t exactly unbiased, though, such claims should still be taken with a grain of salt.

To sum up, groups bring more people into a conflict when it is necessary to win. This has a couple of implications. First, the equilibrium seems to be one of total involvement. In other words, if I am losing, I will bring in enough outsiders to achieve victory, but then my opponent will attempt to do the same. If he is successful, then I will again go seeking others to join my cause, and so on. Before long, every issue becomes like my fictional small town, half on each side of the 50 yard line over lunch money. The second implication follows from the first. Those who are paying attention to politics should be able to find an interesting frame for any issue. My previous blog on health care as gender politics is an example. Of course, a great many people aren’t paying attention in any meaningful way. While that’s unfortunate for all of us, I think it’s mostly their loss; it’s a very interesting time to be alive, politically.