Interest Groups

• Author: Mark Tushnet
• Pages: 1380-1382

Page 1380

Interest groups, or groups of people who try to use the power of government to advance their own interests, have played an important part in the development of both constitutional law and CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY.

CHARLES A. BEARD argued that a particular array of interest groups lay behind the support for and opposition to the Constitution in 1787?1789. Examining the property holdings of supporters and opponents, Beard argued that debtors and owners of real property opposed the Constitution, while personalty interests, especially creditors whose property consisted largely of promises to repay loans, supported it. Beard's specific conclusions have been rejected by later scholars, who have found more complex patterns of property holding than Beard's argument required. Even if the specific argument is rejected, however, consistent patterns of support and opposition based on interests can be found. Constitutional provisions like the ban on state impairments of the OBLIGATION OF CONTRACTS and the prohibition of state issuance of money are best explained by the fact that the supporters of the Constitution feared that they would be outvoted in state legislatures on important issues related to debt and might be able to defend their interests better in the national Congress. Similarly, the likelihood that the new government would be able to resolve controversies over ownership of the undeveloped lands to the west meant that speculators who had purchased western lands were inclined to support the Constitution. Many of the Constitution's compromises over SLAVERY resulted from the sort of interest-group bargaining that characterizes politics. At the same time, the action of interest groups alone seems insufficient to account for the RATIFICATION OF THE CONSTITUTION. Because too many people with too many conflicting interests supported ratification, interest alone cannot explain the adoption of the document. In the end, the Constitution was ratified because of the interaction between interest-group support and conviction that the new government promised to be better as a matter of principle than the Confederation.

Supporters of the new Constitution were alert to the problems that interest groups posed for good government. The central theme in THE FEDERALIST is probably the necessity of designing a government to "curb the influence of faction." The Federalist' s notion of "faction" is not precisely the same as modern ideas about interest groups, for "factions" included groups brought together by a common "passion" as well as those acting to advance a common "interest." Nonetheless, the arguments in The Federalist about the evils of faction capture many modern concerns about the problems interest groups pose for government. For The Federalist, factions must be checked because they are motivated by passions or interests "adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community"?what we would today call the public interest. This remains true, even if the faction amounts to a majority; even a majority can invade the interests of others, and more controversially, even a majority can act in ways that fail to advance the public interest, conceived of as something different from the interests of a majority.

According to The Federalist the new government was well suited to check the influence of faction...