Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the role played by business in American politics—interest flowing not only from the subfield of American political development but many other precincts of academia as well. The questions that motivate scholars are as diverse as they are numerous, but a number of core concerns recur. How politically powerful is business? What is the source of its power? How should its policy preferences be characterized, and how are they represented in the political process? How should scholars go about identifying these policy preferences? Does the political power of business ultimately distort the quality of democratic representation in the United States? If so, how? The first four articles in this issue of Studies make up a special SAPD Forum that addresses these and other important questions. Our point of departure is an important article by Peter Swenson recently appearing in these pages. Readers familiar with Swenson’s article, “Misrepresented Interests,” will remember that it takes up and contributes to a long-standing discussion about whether and how organized business shaped the passage and design of health care policy in the United States. One of Swenson’s central arguments is that business should not be presumptively regarded as opposing the establishment and expansion of social programs. In his reading of the literature on the formation of the American welfare state, scholars across several disciplines are said to share the implicit “belief that there is a pervasive and enduring antagonism between business and the welfare state” (p. 1, all parenthetical page references in the introduction are citing Swenson, “Misrepresented Interests,” unless otherwise indicated). Even when employers, owners, or their organizational representatives are observed explicitly voicing their support for social legislation, such statements are sometimes interpreted as a strategic accommodation to larger political realities that limit what is possible. Swenson argues that expressions of support for a policy are not the only form of strategic accommodation practiced by sophisticated political actors such as business—so are expressions of opposition to a policy (p. 3). What is needed to distinguish various kinds of strategically motivated position taking from actual preferences is a clear and precise sense of the economic interests in play. When information about economic interests is weighed and considered, he argues, it becomes evident that business stances toward the welfare state are variable, and there are indeed circumstances in which it is not only imaginable but perhaps even likely that selected segments of the business community sincerely support particular incarnations of the welfare state (pp. 3–4). Swenson substantiates his argument through a look at the political development of health care policy in the United States, focusing especially on the passage and design of Medicare in 1965. A leading perspective in the literature sees business as deeply opposed to Medicare. Swenson develops a different view. Drawing on contemporaneous observations from business journalists, oral histories of lawmakers, congressional testimony, archival research in presidential libraries, and the records of lawmakers and interest groups, he makes the case that a nontrivial set of large employers, who had begun to take on responsibility for financing the health care of their retirees in the early 1960s, were becoming interested in exploring policy options that would relieve them of their commitments (pp. 7–9). Swenson also makes a number of observations that strike him as inconsistent with the notion that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which expressed hostility to Medicare, were accurately representing the views of their full membership—much less the business community as a whole. For instance, a number of state chambers of commerce did not apparently sign a statement of opposition to Medicare, and only a third of NAM members in their “Eastern division” specifically indicated that they were against government coverage of the elderly. Moreover, only a few industries joined the USCC and NAM in their diehard, public resistance to Medicare, and many of these were industries composed of small businesses, such as the restaurant industry (pp. 12–13). Swenson interprets his findings as evidence that there was actually “great diversity of opinion within business on Medicare.” The “preponderance of