The Hollow Core : Private Interests in National Policy Making

Critics of the policy-making process argue that private interest groups exert too much influence on the decisions of government, but only rarely has this proposition been examined systematically. "The Hollow Core" draws on interviews with more than 300 interest groups, 800 lobbyists, and 300 government officials to assess the efforts of private organizations to influence federal policy in four areas - agriculture, energy, health and labour policy. This extraordinary body of original data, subjected to sophisticated analysis, creates a powerful description of these interest groups and the people who work for them; the book will be invaluable to political scientists, sociologists, policymakers, and citizens who want a broad and realistic assessment of the networks of influence that lie behind the policy-making process. The book includes information on the lobbyists' work, career histories, social origins, social and political values, networks of association, positions on specific policy proposals, and patterns of alliance and opposition. The authors identify a central paradox in efforts to shape public policy: as private interest organizations seek to maximize control of their lobbyists and to gather more and more information about public policy, their very efforts to control uncertainty contribute to the development of a still more complex policy-making environment, thus reinforcing the uncertainty of outcomes. Bringing together several strands of sociologists' network theory and political scientists' interest group theory, the authors reveal and explain the absence of any central core of influentials in the policy process.