Policy Subsystems Iron Triangles and Subgovernments Compared to Issue Networks and Advocacy Coalitions

Beyond Separation of Powers

As high school students we all learned about the Constitutional separation of powers. With each of the three branches of government -- the judicial, executive, and legislative -- having the power to limit the power of the others, no one aspect of government could hold the American people hostage. This was the structure that the Framers put into effect to ensure that Americans would have an efficient, but humane, system of government. It was also, from its inception, an idealistic one. Indeed, perhaps too idealistic, for while it is good for democracy to have power divided among many rather than only a few, it is in human nature to want to concentrate power within oneself.

Thus over the over two-and-a-quarter- centuries of our nation's history, people have devised various extra-Constitutional methods for accumulating power. This paper examines three different ways in which individuals and political and interest groups have accrued power for themselves within American public life. Focusing on the decades since 1980, when Ronald Reagan began his first term as president, I will assess which of the three political strategies best explains American policymaking and polity.

These three political strategies that I will be examining in this paper are the iron triangle, the subgovernment, and policy subsystems. I will begin with a brief definition of each of these three before analyzing the ways in which these models fit the ways in which the American political scene has been organized over the past several administrations.

The Iron Triangle

The concept of the iron triangle is one that is familiar to most Americans, although the term itself may well not be. The "military-industrial complex" -- the phrase was made famous by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech -- is an example of an iron triangle. In the United States, the Congress is the federal legislative branch, of course. But this formal way of understanding its power is only one way of defining or categorizing the way that Congress works. For Congress also holds tremendous bureaucratic power, something that tends to be overlooked in the greater focus on its more purely political (i.e. law-making) functions.

It is important to define the concept of bureaucratic power as well, for the term as it is used by political scientists and within this paper is related to but not precisely the same as the way in which it is used in everyday speech. The common definition of bureaucracy -- and this is especially true in this day of the rising popularity of the Tea Party -- is that bureaucracy is a bad thing. Bureaucracy (and bureaucrats) are often held up as if they were inherently undemocratic and purposefully antagonistic, something that stands in the way of the rights of citizens.

While this definition of bureaucracy may be true in specific circumstances (and in my own experience this is in fact not the case), is has a more specific and much more neutral meaning. In technical terms, a bureaucracy is simply the combined rules or regulations along with formalized procedures and methodologies that determine how an organization functions. Bureaucracies tend to be instituted only in larger organizations because less formal methods of organizing work tends to be sufficient in smaller groups. (For example, a surgical team performing a multiple-organ transplant must have established procedures while a family of four planning a picnic can easily do things on an ad hoc basis.) Bureaucracies also tend to be marked by a formal division of labor.

So, in the above example, surgical nurses perform certain designated tasks, anesthesiologists other jobs, surgeons still others, while facilities managers ensure that the lights, air conditioning or heating, and plumbing works. Bureaucracies are also generally marked by formal hierarchies: Surgeons outrank nurses, for example, but must cede to the expertise of anesthesiologists in some areas. (Ad hoc organizations can have forms of hierarchies as well, of course, but while parents outrank children in some sense, they cannot fire their children and fire new ones.)

Most people are familiar with Congress -- to the extent that they are familiar with it at all -- only as an elected body that makes political decisions through the mechanism of floor votes that are sometimes featured on CNN. But, while this is of course an important part of the way in which Congress wields its power, it exercises a far greater power through its control of the bureaucratic mechanisms of the federal government. The committees and subcommittees of both houses of Congress have authority (through both legislative and purse-string power) over federal departments, agencies, and government contractors, and this bureaucratic power is extremely potent indeed. Interest groups both importune and pressure members of Congress to act in ways that benefit them.

An example will make this clearer. A defense contractor like Lockheed Martin wants to receive a Department of Defense contract for a new electronic system. The chairs of the relevant Congressional committees and subcommittees are not amenable to provide funding for the electronic system because it seems to duplicate systems already in use for a higher price. During the next election cycle, Lockheed Martin contributes money to candidates who will look more kindly on its merchandise. When these candidates are elected, they vote to fund the new system and put pressure through the budgetary process on the Department of Defense to accept the contract.

Although the contracting process is supposed to be independent of such Congressional pressure, this is more true in the ideal than the actual, and Lockheed Martin receives the contract. The company, through its contributions to candidates and PACs helps keep these legislators in office and everyone -- the contractors, the legislators, and the bureaucrats at the Department of Defense become cozier and cozier. The special interests can come to have significant power over legislators through campaign contributions as well as the promise of offering well-paid lobbying positions to legislators once they leave public service.

Agencies and departments can also gain power over legislators if they gain the loyalty of special interests who then use their power and/or money to help keep legislators in office -- or help replace them with more easily influenced legislators. (I should note that I have only chosen Lockheed Martin here as an example of a major governmental contractor; I do not mean to suggest that they act in a way that is any more unethical than is the norm.) The coziness of such iron triangle relationships can result in governmental money, influence, and power being used to benefit those people occupying the three corners of the triangle rather than the American people as a whole.

While such triads of legislators, special interests, and bureaucracies do not necessarily have to be detrimental in their effects on the fiber of American democracy, they can in fact be quite malignant. This malignancy is especially likely to evidence itself in bureaucrats failing to regulate the special interests over whom they are supposed to exercise oversight, such as a Department of Defense that does not provide sufficient protective paneling for convey vehicles, an Environment Protection Agency that allows power plants to keep burning coal in highly polluting ways, or a Department of Health and Human Services that caters to anti-abortion groups by legitimizing research that draws false connections between abortion and breast cancer.

This especially pernicious consequence of an iron triangle -- in which a governmental regulatory agency serves not the public weal but the special interests that it was created to oversee -- is called "regulatory capture." Arguably, such "captured agencies" do more harm than would be the case if there were no regulatory agency at all. The general public is likely to be unaware that agencies have been "captured" and so will assume that the agency is in fact doing its job. If there were no agency at all, on the other hand, the public would be more likely to be aware of the absence of a regulatory body. In such a case, that is, in the absence of any formal regulatory mechanisms, individual citizens might create informal watchdog groups that would serve roughly the same function.

Eisenhower saw the potential problems of the iron triangle with terrible prescience. His farewell speech (taken from the Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040) precisely limned the undue influences that can arise in such a relationship:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

It is hard not to hear in these words a Cassandra-like warning -- an accurate description of the future that was to go unheeded and unbelieved.

Subgovernments

While there is essentially universal agreement on the basic dynamics of the iron triangle concept, there is a certain amount of disagreement over what constitutes a subgovernment system. (It should be noted that some scholars use the terms "iron triangle" and "subgovernment" interchangeably.) For the purpose of this paper, I am defining a subgovernment as a cluster or grouping of individuals that act both as individuals and as a collective that acts so as to maximize the effectiveness of the bureaucratic (or routinized) decisions in one area of political decision making (deHaven-Smith & Van Horn, 2005, p. 630).

One can see how this model is aligned with that of the iron triangle model. In fact, I would argue that the iron triangle model is one particular manifestation of a subgovernment. However, there are also other possible manifestations (or embodiments) of a subgovernment, for often there are more than three players in the setting of policy. Let us look at a specific example to demonstrate how this can be the case.

If one looks at the issue of abortion policy in the United States, there are far more than three groups of players. Moreover, the players are connected to each other in a way that is more complex than the highly predictable and reified relationships that exist in an iron triangle model. The key players in this area of American polity include: Members of both houses of Congress on both the pro-choice and pro-life sides; the president; the hierarchy of the Federal Drug Administration (in its regulatory role of such things as RU-486, a drug that induces abortion); the Department of Health and Human Services (for its role in setting national health policy); the Surgeon General (for the same reason); the federal judiciary (in its role in hearing cases that apply to the protections that apply to family planning clinics); and the U.S. Supreme Court (for its ability to determine the Constitutional basis for the individual right to privacy and thus of a woman's right to choose an abortion).

Others involved in this system are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (which is one of the bodies that investigates clinic violence and the actions of militant anti-choice groups); state and local police agencies (for the same reason); the Department of Education (which influences what young people are taught about human sexuality); state and local educational bureaucracies (for the same reason); state legislatures and state houses (for setting abortion policy that is supposed to lie within the bounds of federally determined policy, although the recent abortion laws enacted in Nebraska call this latter into question).

Other members of this subgovernment are public and private hospitals (which set their own policies on abortion and choose to train or refuse to train doctors to perform abortions); the Catholic Church (which uses its power to try to have laws enacted that limit or ban abortion); the Joint Committee on Accreditation of Healthcare Agencies; the Environmental Protection Agency (which oversees the disposal of medical waste, including fetal tissue); the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; organized lay political groups such as NARAL and Americans United for Life;

Finally there are the individual activists who protest at clinics or serve as clinic protectors, call and write their representatives, attend rallies and marches, etc. And each voter in a national (and often in state) elections whose choices will have the chance to affect abortion policy. Candidates (especially those running for state or lower offices) often run on a platform that does not mention abortion in any way; this does not mean that they will not be called upon once in office to make decision about abortion rights. Thus voters who select them may not even be aware of the fact they are participants in this subgovernment: This kind of unintentional participation is not something that could occur in an iron triangle model,

Other stakeholders could be added to this list, but the above description suggests how complex and dynamic the subgovernment of abortion politics in the United States is. Most of the participants are government personnel; those participants who are private citizens are still involved in a governmental process because they are focused on influencing governmental policy either directly or indirectly (Jordan & Maloney, 1997).

Some scholars would argue that the above example violates some of the key characteristics of subgovernments in that there is a high rather than a low level of political partisanship and that the membership is large (Lee, 2006). (This last is true only if one includes non-governmental members. This would always be the case: There will be a large membership in a subgovernment if one includes those members of the citizenry who are affected by or interested in the policy at hand.) However, I would argue that the arena of abortion politics does qualify on the ground that this arena of public policy exhibits a well-defined set of jurisdictional rules, enduring and in large measure highly predictable coalitions among the various players, and that there is (on each side) a clear definition of the problem, relatively little intra-side conflict, and little tolerance on each side for any level of dissent.

Policy Subsystems

As was noted about the models of iron triangles and subgovernments, it is also the case that there are key similarities between those two forms of policymaking and the activity that goes on in a policy subsystem. Jones & Jenkins-Smith (2009) provide an excellent operationalization of a policy subsystem. They list the following criteria for a policy subsystem:

1. Participants regard themselves as a semi-autonomous community who share a domain of expertise.

2. Participants have sought to influence public policy within the domain over a fairly long period of time (i.e., seven to ten years).

3. There exist specialized units within relevant governmental agencies to deal with the policy of interest.

4. There exist interest groups, or specialized subunits within interest groups, that regard this as a major policy topic (p. 44).

They note that subsystems can function in parallel to each other and that there can also be subsidiary elements of the subsystems themselves -- rather like subatomic particles. Key among these sub-subsystematic groups are advocates of a particular position arising from the policy content. Nearly inevitably, every subsystem gives birth (or has been giving birth by) advocates. "Advocacy coalitions exist within subsystems, consisting of policy participants" (Jones & Jenkins-Smith, 2009, p. 45).

These "policy entrepreneurs are the primary agent of interest operating within and across subsystems.... actors from a variety of public and private organizations who are actively concerned with policy problem or issue . . . And who regularly seek to influence policy" (Jones & Jenkins-Smith, 2009, p. 45). These policy subsystem actors:

[H]ave quite general internal incentive structures that operate concurrently within institutionally defined incentive structures or policy venues. Policy entrepreneurs may pursue policy change or maintenance for purposes of personal interest, promoting values, and because they enjoy the game. [Many] derive from their desire to translate their belief systems into public policies. (Jones & Jenkins-Smith, 2009, p. 45).

Subsystems are highly diverse in their structure, varying in "size, degree of connectedness, conflict, longevity, commitment, degree of formal or informal participation, and scope of activities.... The structure and activities are reflective of the policy domain and environment in which they exist" (Orr, 2006).