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Associative Principles and Democratic Reform 29

Power is, of course, limited by the very complexity of the means of its exercise, and, therefore, no single will can prevail through-out the elaborate decision-making and administrative structures that are nominally grouped within the constitutional limits of the modern State. Totalitarian projects have generally failed for this very reason, rather than from active resistance from below. How-ever, this fact of the inevitable plurality of power undermines the claims of those republican democrats who believe that centralized power can be madę democratically accountable. It means that however determined they are, the will of elected representatives can only run so far and so consistently within the ramified admin-istrative machinery of the modern State.

American pluralists might argue the foregoing is merely an argument against the tyranny of the majority in another guise, and that modem democracies have means for avoiding these prob-lems. Because modem societies are composed of highly pluralistic and competing interest groups, the threat of majority tyranny is avoided, and modem politics actually consists in the competition of issue-specific minority groups to control policy or influence govemment on the issue in question. In the process of plural political competition, the most successful and best-organized minorities come to dominate on particular issues, but the capacity of these minorities to influence politics does not cumulate from one issue to another. R.A. Dahl develops this argument very clearly in Who Governs? (1961), and against ruling class or power elite conceptions of the distribution of power it has a good deal of force.

What it ignores is the threefold danger inherent in the combina-

aon of pluralistic political competition and highly-centralized :ates. First, there is the danger that highly exclusive and self-(ghterested groups will lobby the State, and either impose ex-jcśjremely partisan and unpopular views on others or secure lj|||dvantages for themselves through public policy and to the detri-c=5nent of the public interest. We have seen Dahl (1985) recognizing F^he dangers of undue corporate influence, but pluralists have [cdwoken up rather late to the extent to which the competition lIF^o influence big government has led to the domination of the [ir^American political process by exclusive and self-interested lob-ps3bies. Second, is the danger for policy to swing back and forth or to become incoherent as successive highly-polarized pressure groups