Jonathan Rauch is author of Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working, in which he examines the explosion of special interest groups and their effect on government's ability to get things done. He is also a columnist for National Journal and correspondent for the Atlantic. NationalJournal.com's Lucas Grindley spoke with Rauch about whether the Web has affected interest groups' influence since the book was last published in 2000. Edited excerpts follow. Visit the Insider Interviews archives to read previous discussions in this series.
NJ: In your book, you describe the explosion of interest groups that preceded the new millennium. What effect has the Web's ascension had on increasing or decreasing the number and the size of interest groups?
Rauch: The best indicators that we've seen suggest that there's been continued, in fact quite rapid growth in the formation of interest groups. But the other thing that seems to have happened is that it seems like the Internet has, to some extent, lowered the barriers for both organizing and counter-organizing. For example, it may be easier to start a special interest group, but it's also easier to start a journalistic outlet or a blog to examine the workings of that group or to form a grassroots effort that might try to counteract it.... So my guess would be that the Web leads to an increase in the amount of activity but also leads to a fair amount of offsetting activity.
NJ: Because the barrier to entry is so much lower, does that then reduce the influence of mainstream interest groups over the long run?
Rauch: It might be that a lot of these smaller groups offset each other and, at the end of the day, the very large established lobbying groups remain relatively much more powerful. It may even be that in the long run the large, established groups wind up using these tools very effectively themselves. But one distinction that might be worth keeping in mind is political scientists, back in the day when I was doing a whole lot of research on interest-group formation, tended to distinguish between direct participation groups and essentially check-writing groups. Direct participation, of course, being where you show up for activities and you're actually involved in volunteer work, and check-writing groups being groups like the AARP, where your relationship with the group is primarily support and financial. The checkbook groups tend to be much more driven by staff in Washington. They tend to be more professionalized. They tend to be more focused around lobbying for goods from the government -- subsidies, programs, that sort of thing. To the extent that the Internet is making it easier to form participatory groups and that more people are participating, this may also be a different kind of interest-group activity than what we've become used to thinking of as bad special interests coming to Washington seeking subsidies.
NJ: As more interest groups grow, they tend to get even more specialized, you wrote. I wonder if we'll see the same thing on the Web since anyone can form a Facebook group.
Rauch: That's a great question, but I'm guessing you'll see more of both, and here's why. It gets very easy to form a specialized group for people with some strange skin disease for just the reason you mentioned. But the thing that's always been hardest in group formation in the past is to form groups that represent a large, diffuse public interest -- for all the reasons that I've discussed in my book and that public choice theorists have written about for generations. It's difficult and expensive to form a traditional group because you're going to have to get incorporated, and you're probably going to need a lawyer, and you're probably going to need staff and headquarters, bricks and mortar and copy machines and someone to answer the phone and everything like that. It's expensive to do that. So citizens tend not to want to do that. It's left to specialists and professionals or people with very large financial interests in getting something from government, like farm lobbies, for example.
The Internet has reduced those costs dramatically. That's the Facebook phenomenon, right? Or it's blogging. You could have groups literally appear overnight. The groups that stimulated national marches in states across the country in protest to the anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative in California -- those formed overnight because one person, basically, set up a Web site. So the result of that is it potentially gets much easier for ordinary citizens to organize in a shared interest. And that might be the kind of tool that would help balance the equation.
NJ: There are a lot of concerns from interest groups that Barack Obama will use his Web followers to pressure Congress into action on his priorities. Do you buy into the notion that these social networks will end up being more powerful than traditional Washington lobbying?
Rauch: We'll know in a hurry. The open question is how easy or hard is it to keep these networks and activists alive. Bricks-and-mortar lobbying groups and interest groups do that by actually hiring people who fundraise, make budgets from year to year and so on. They can hit hard times and either cave in or downsize -- and that often happens -- but I don't think what we know yet is whether grassroots groups that spring up overnight can stay around. Now, some of them, of course, have made this transition. MoveOn went from being a grassroots group to being an established political player. So I guess I would say the potential is definitely there to see the Web stimulate enduring start-ups.
NJ: Yeah -- if they can stick around.
Rauch: If they can stick around. A lot of my skepticism about the Internet, as you can tell, has washed away. The Internet won't change the basic underlying dynamics of lobbying, which is it's always going to be much easier for narrow interests to get together and get subsidies and other gimmes from government than it is for broad, diffuse groups, for the simple reason that if I'm a farmer and I'm getting a $100,000 check from the government, I'll spend $90,000 to defend that check. That's a lot of money. If I'm a taxpayer and that farm subsidy is costing me 3 cents a year, which is maybe about what it does cost, I'll spend maybe a fraction of a cent a year, if anything, to oppose it. So that fundamental asymmetry isn't going to change. The Internet can't change that and nothing else can. But what the Internet can do is make it much more possible to organize those nickel-and-dime and small-penny contributors into something that really might be a fairly considerable counterbalance to business as usual in Washington.
NJ: I guess it depends how much these people value their time.
Rauch: Yes, and how easy it becomes to make payments. And what the track record is of actually getting change to happen. If, for example, you saw a national -- let's make something up -- "anti-bridge-to-nowhere coalition," and you manage to get half a million people to give a dollar each with PayPal, and you were able to spend that money effectively to kill an actual bridge, well, that would get people's attention. So that's what we're, I think, really looking for in the next four years -- ways to institutionalize and focus these efforts in ways that will point them effectively at Washington.
NJ: Someone I spoke with suggested applying Digg to earmarks -- have a Digg that people go in and rate up the biggest wastes of money, but also one that goes in and rates up the best uses of money. You talked about the lack of competition among lobbying groups. Might this increase the amount of time they spend lobbying Americans for their ideas or lobbying against other lobbies?
Rauch: Yeah, maybe. I think it's a really nifty idea. Don't forget, though, lobbies are very good at using these tools themselves. If there's a little earmark in there that no one really cares about except the recipient, they might actually use this kind of tool to get lots of people to go in and say, "Don't cut this one. This one's really important. This one saved my daughter's life. Without this one my mother would still be starving on the street," and what have you. So those tools can cut both directions. There is already a really interesting effort in some of the states... which is to put basically all government contracts and procurement documents online in a huge document dump so that ordinary citizens can log on and look at every single thing that the government is spending money on and turn citizens into kind of a super accounting force to dig up back-scratching deals, favors to relatives. Quite a few states are already doing that.... That's another really interesting sunshine tool and a way in which you might be able to expose some of the creatures that crawl around under these rocks.
NJ: Sen. John McCain would go around saying he was going to fight pork projects and you would know the names of their sponsors. Do you think it makes a difference if there's increased awareness of all these projects?
Rauch: Yes, it probably will. What I could not tell you is the magnitude or direction. The reason I couldn't tell you the magnitude is that most pork barrel projects are there for a reason, which is that somebody wants them and really cares about them. How much does it matter if a few people get annoyed about it or make fun of it? Maybe not very much. And I also can't tell you the direction because a lot of the public likes these projects, too. When it's explained to them, they say, "Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, we should have that. We need a museum for Woodstock," or whatever. So these things actually could turn into ways that recipients of government money can kind of advertise what they're doing, rally support for what they're doing. I'd say to me it's an open book now how this affects government.
NJ: What if there was a movement for new earmarks proposed not through the normal system but proposed through the Web. Could you imagine a congressman picking this up and trying to get it approved?
Rauch: Yeah, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. Maybe it already has.
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