Issue Networks

Abstract

Main point: It's not iron triangles, it's issue networks (IN's). Or, at least, the idea of iron triangles is incomplete. Three things happened to government since Korean War (Heclo measures from 1955, when US returned to normal after Korea). 1) We live in an era of governmental growth. Huge increase in government since end of Korean War. 2) "peculiar, loose-jointed play of influence that is accompanying this growth." 3) layering and specialization that have overtaken the government work force. But this has mostly been in expenditures of money, not increase in the governmental work force. Government employment (chart of p. 255) has remained level. This is the paradox of expanding government and stable bureaucracy. There has been a push-pull effect on the relationship between democratic politics and the executive establishment. On one hand, growth of government has pushed more policy concerns out of fed government and to intermediary issue groups; but on the other hand, the requirement to lead an increasingly complex government has pulled policy understanding away from average citizen. What's happened? Growth of IN's. IN's are almost the opposite of iron triangles. "A shared-knowledge group having to do with some aspect (or, as defined by the network, some problem) of public policy" (261). Where iron triangles involve the few and the powerful, IN's are composed of the "many whose web of influence provoke and guide the exercise of power." Participants move in and out of the network constantly, and direct material interest is often secondary to intellectual and emotional commitment. IN's alter the once stable political landscape and decrease predictability and impose strains on those who are supposedly in charge in government. Who is important in government is defined by the networks themselves. Networks share information on issues and people. This is all very similar to the idea of the meritocracy. Heclo describes Carter's government as made up of movement among four great estates: academia, corporate business and the law, the bureaucracy, and, to a lesser extent, elective politics. These IN's control information on the issue at hand, and since they are more knowledgeable about it, they make it more complicated for everyone, with the result that the average person doesn't understand government and what it's doing. The ideas in this paper would meld nicely with the ideas in the paper above in an institutions question. Growth of IN's has led to increased costs of sanctions, so Congress has turned to administrative procedure to deal with the ever-worsening principal-agent problem. The more complex IN's make issues, the more Congress has to use administrative procedures to let constituency groups (and the experts they hire) fight it out in court with the agencies (and the experts who run them). It's a way to let members of issue networks settle things among themselves.