Factors Shaping the Growth of Business Associations and their Involvement in Political Finance

Abstract

The associational form of interest group is viewed universally as one of the most typical structures of industrial societies, the functioning of which determines to a very considerable extent the manner in which the more explicitly political structures, such as parties, process and aggregate demands. For Almond, associational interest articulation is preferable to alternative forms — anomic, institutional or non-associational — on the criteria that it tends to produce the more “orderly” processing of demands, “good” boundary maintenance between society and polity, and efficient rule-making that rationalize the operation of the political system.¹ To Kerr the association is so much a member of the Establishment that it “ranges alongside the state and the enterprise as the locus of power in pluralistic industrialism,” active in a setting where struggles have become “contests,” where “battles” are of the kind that are fought “in the corridors instead of the streets,” and where “memos will flow instead of blood.” ² These attributes apply also to the bulk of contemporary associational activity in the three countries under discussion here, yet only two generations ago the progenitors of the labor and business associations which figure most prominently in our inquiry were formed under conditions where conflict often outweighed consensus