5.7 - Groups Influencing Policy Outcomes
Social Movements and Their Characteristics
Social Movements: broad, grassroots efforts to achieve major policy change, often arising when many people rise up together over a shared concern.
- Compared to interest groups: more decentralized, often lacking clear leadership, resources, and defined policy goals, which can limit their effectiveness, though they can still succeed.
- Single-issue groups: focus on one issue and often judge candidates only by it. Example: Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), founded in 1980, pushed for the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which led every state to raise its drinking age to 21.
- Ideological movements: push a broad set of beliefs about government. Example: the Tea Party movement, which started in 2009, opposed government spending and the Affordable Care Act and helped Republicans gain 63 House seats in 2010.
Tactics Used by Social Movements
- Protest Movements: direct, visible actions like marches, demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts.
- Examples: the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Women's March in 2017, and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
- Civil Disobedience: intentionally breaking the law as a form of peaceful protest, like sit-ins or Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat.
- Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963): written by Martin Luther King Jr. after his arrest for leading protests against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. King argued that people have a moral duty to break unjust laws, like segregation laws, openly and peacefully, and that nonviolent direct action creates enough tension that a community can no longer ignore the problem. Waiting, he wrote, had almost always meant never.
- Why it matters here: it explains why movements break laws on purpose and how they force an issue onto the government's agenda. The Birmingham protests helped push President Kennedy to propose the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Policy-Making Environment
Policy decisions get shaped by a crowded field of competing voices, interest groups, professional organizations, social movements, the military, and various agencies, all trying to get a piece of the influence.
The federal budget process shows how these actors push at different stages, and to different degrees:
- Agency requests: each agency, including the Defense Department, asks for money. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) combines the requests into the President's budget proposal, sent to Congress early in the year.
- Budget resolution: the House and Senate Budget Committees set overall spending totals, using estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
- Appropriations: the Appropriations Committees write the yearly spending bills. This is where lobbying is heaviest: defense contractors push for weapons programs, and universities and medical researchers push for National Institutes of Health funding.
- Final passage: both chambers pass the bills and the President signs or vetoes them. If they miss the October 1 start of the fiscal year, Congress passes a temporary continuing resolution or parts of the government shut down.
Agencies and the military shape the first draft, professional organizations and interest groups work the committees, and social movements mostly work from the outside by changing public opinion so lawmakers feel pressure.
Elections, Parties, and Major Policy Shifts
A big election can give one party enough power to pass major new policies, and occasionally it reshapes which groups vote for which party (a realignment, see 5.4).
- 1932: Franklin Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress passed the New Deal, and the New Deal coalition kept Democrats the majority party for decades.
- 1964: Lyndon Johnson's landslide and big Democratic majorities in Congress led to Great Society programs, including Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
- 1980: Ronald Reagan's win led to large tax cuts in 1981 and a push to shrink the federal government.
- 2008: Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
- 2016: Donald Trump and a Republican Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.
Big picture
Social movements are decentralized, grassroots pushes for major change, using tactics like protest and civil disobedience. Unlike interest groups, they often lack formal structure, which can hurt their staying power, but they still operate within a busy policy environment full of competing interests all vying for influence.