결사체 민주주의의 이론적 일고 - 위스콘신 주 이익단체의 선별적 활동사례를 중심으로

A Theoretical Discourse on Associative Democracy: Focusing on the Selective State-level Interest Group Activities in Wisconsin

  Previous research on state-level interest group activities tended to bias toward the pluralist perspective, which was more persuasively applicable to those at the federal level in the United States. Consequently, it was rather a daunting task to distinguish major independent variables that are primarily attributable to interest group activities at the federal level from the state-level counterparts, Recently, however, scholars are increasingly taking a note of the discrepancy in interest group activities across two different levels. As seen from temporal changes in state-level interest group activities later, the corporatist perspective cannot explain systematically this intra-level difference in changes of state-level interest group activities. This paper proposes that associative democracy could supplement previous works by accounting for not only the inter-level divergency in interest group activities, but also a wide range of interest group activities among states as well as their variegated transformation for the past 40 years or so. To do so, this paper focuses on associative democracy and apply the "power concentration paradox" model to the Campaign for a Sustainable Milwaukee(CSM) and the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership(WRTP). These two successful cases illustrate how "mischiefs of faction" are resolved by the "art of association," as elaborated in associative democracy. Then, I draw a conclusion that associative democracy can complement pluralist or corporatist perspectives in explaining state-level interest group activities in the United States, thus contributing to their systematic theory.