Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Strength in Numbers : The Political Power of Weak Interests, Hardback Book

Strength in Numbers : The Political Power of Weak Interests Hardback

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Many consumers feel powerless in the face of big industry’s interests. And the dominant view of economic regulators (influenced by Mancur Olson’s book The Logic of Collective Action, published in 1965) agrees with them.

According to this view, diffuse interests like those of consumers are too difficult to organize and too weak to influence public policy, which is determined by the concentrated interests of industrial-strength players.

Gunnar Trumbull makes the case that this view represents a misreading of both the historical record and the core logic of interest representation.

Weak interests, he reveals, quite often emerge the victors in policy battles. Based on a cross-national set of empirical case studies focused on the consumer, retail, credit, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors, Strength in Numbers develops an alternative model of interest representation.

The central challenge in influencing public policy, Trumbull argues, is not organization but legitimation.

How do diffuse consumer groups convince legislators that their aims are more legitimate than industry’s?

By forging unlikely alliances among the main actors in the process: activists, industry, and regulators.

Trumbull explains how these “legitimacy coalitions” form around narratives that tie their agenda to a broader public interest, such as expanded access to goods or protection against harm.

Successful legitimizing tactics explain why industry has been less powerful than is commonly thought in shaping agricultural policy in Europe and pharmaceutical policy in the United States.

In both instances, weak interests carried the day.

Information

Other Formats

Save 13%

£51.95

£45.05

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information