Ethnic Lobbying in Foreign Policy

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Haney
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Scholarly Activity

Much of the literature on ethnic lobby groups comes from either research on interest groups or ethnicity that looks to foreign policy cases, or foreign policy analysis studies that focus on the role of interest groups or ethnic groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a burst of scholarly activity regarding ethnic interest group activism in US foreign policy, following the changes in American society and in the US Congress that emerged from the wake of Watergate, Vietnam, and the civil rights movement. Later, the end of the Cold War brought a new burst of ethnic lobbying on foreign policy, and a new wave of scholarly attention to these issues. During both of these bursts of attention, studies predominantly focused on the activities of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was often seen as an exception to the rule that interest groups are not very significant forces in the foreign policy sphere. Another source of research on ethnic issues and foreign policy is the emerging literature on ethnicity, the construction thereof, and the political development of ethnic communities over time. The three basic issues that stand out in the literature about ethnic lobbying on foreign policy include the formation of ethnic interest groups, the roots of ethnic interest group success, and whether ethnic lobbies actually capture policy in their respective areas, at least in the context of US foreign policy. Meanwhile, the two level game perspective and the competition among ethnic groups needs further exploration.

scholarly journals The potential influence of interest groups on the us foreign policy: A case of Kosovo

2017 ◽  
pp. 413-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslav Mitrovic
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Strong Impact ◽  
Potential Influence ◽  
Interest Representation ◽  
Effective Implementation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Analysis And Synthesis ◽  
Policy Arena

Current developments in the world geopolitical arena indicate that the US foreign policy has a strong impact on global and regional scene. At same time, interest representation or lobbying is legally based and professionally legitimized activity, which is under regulatory observation of authorities and general public. In this paper, the author discusses organizational forms of political interest representation, as well as the models of lobbying in the US foreign policy. Moreover, the results of the organized influence on the US foreign policy decisions through the participation of Albanian interest groups in support of the implementation of the so-called ?Republic of Kosovo? project are presented in the paper. The methodology of content analysis and synthesis of conclusions induced the resultant indicators of the effective implementation of the interest representation strategy. Conclusions point to the potentials of organized and strategically planned lob?bying activities toward the US institutions in support of achieving national interest in foreign policy arena.

19. Religion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Emergency Plan ◽  
Global War On Terror ◽  
Christian Zionism ◽  
Global Affairs ◽  
Global War ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines the influence of religion on US foreign policy. It first considers how religion affected American policy during the Cold War, from the time of Harry S. Truman to George H. W. Bush, before discussing the bilateral relationship between Israel and the United States. It then looks at the rise of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a US-based interest group, and how its work has been complemented by conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who ascribe to Christian Zionism. It also explores the ways in which religion has intersected with the global war on terror and US foreign policy, how the US resorted to faith-based diplomacy, the issue of religious freedom, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in Africa. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs (ORGA), created by Barack Obama.

Interest Groups and American Political Development

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dara Z. Strolovitch ◽  
Daniel J. Tichenor
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
Advocacy Organizations ◽  
Organized Interests ◽  
Early American ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
American Interest ◽  
Group Politics

Do interest groups enhance or impede the democratic exercise of power? This chapter addresses this long-debated question by examining what longitudinal and American Political Development (APD) approaches contribute to the study of interest groups and what studies of organized interests illuminate about APD. We survey the dominant approaches to interest groups within political science, examine organized interests and lobbying in the early American republic, and document the rise of the modern interest group system at the beginning of the twentieth century. We then explore the role played by advocacy organizations in the trajectories of progress for marginalized groups. We show that APD scholarship has offered fresh insights about patterns and transformations of American interest group politics, and argue that our understanding of the development of American politics will benefit from more robust conversations between the traditional interest group literature and longitudinal and APD approaches to group politics.

Labor and US Foreign Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKillen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations

American workers have often been characterized by the press, scholars, and policy-makers as apathetic and ill-informed about foreign policy issues. To highlight this point, scholars have frequently used an anecdote about a blue-collar worker who responded to an interviewer’s questions regarding international issues in the 1940s by exclaiming “Foreign Affairs! That’s for people who don’t have to work for a living.” Yet missing from many such appraisals is a consideration of the long history of efforts by both informal groups of workers and labor unions to articulate and defend the perceived international interests of American workers. During the early years of the American Republic, groups of workers used crowd actions, boycotts, and protests to make their views on important foreign policy issues known. In the late 19th century, emerging national labor unions experimented with interest group lobbying as well as forms of collective action championed by the international labor movement to promote working-class foreign policy interests. Many 20th- and 21st-century US labor groups shared in common a belief that government leaders failed to adequately understand the international concerns and perspectives of workers. Yet such groups often pursued different types of foreign policy influence. Some dominant labor organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), participated in federal bureaucracies, advisory councils, and diplomatic missions and programs designed to encourage collaboration among business, state, and labor leaders in formulating and promoting US foreign policy. Yet other labor groups, as well as dissidents within the AFL and CIO, argued that these power-sharing arrangements compromised labor’s independence and led some trade union leaders to support policies that actually hurt both American and foreign workers. Particularly important in fueling internal opposition to AFL-CIO foreign policies were immigrant workers and those with specific ethno-racial concerns. Some dissenting groups and activists participated in traditional forms of interest group lobbying in order to promote an independent international agenda for labor; others committed themselves to the foreign policy programs of socialist, labor, or communist parties. Still others, such as the Industrial Workers of the World, advocated strike and international economic actions by workers to influence US foreign policy or to oppose US business activities abroad.

scholarly journals The Historiography of Twentieth-Century American Conservatism

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kimmage
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Reagan Era

After a period of relative neglect, the study of postwar American conservatism has recently come to preoccupy historians of the United States. It now ranks among the liveliest subjects in the entire field of 20th-century US history. The historiography breaks into four phases. In an early phase, from the 1950s through the 1970s, conservatism being written into the historical narrative was an act of scholarly will at a time when liberalism and radicalism were much closer to the historiographical mainstream. In a second phase, in the 1970s and 1980s, conservatism was deemed a major historical force in modern America and was characterized as a “backlash” against the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the feminist movement, etc. In a third phase, conservatism was presented as more active than reactive. according to these historians, ideas that had crystallized in the 1950s came into their own politically in the 1980s, in the Reagan era. During the fourth and (for the time being) final phase, accent has fallen on the varieties of American conservatism and on its hybrid nature, absorbing and interacting with trends that could be characterized as liberal or radical. In this article, the relevant historiography is separated into seven branches (arranged alphabetically): anticommunism, the conservative movement, foreign policy, libertarianism, media, race-class-gender, and traditionalism. It has been argued that anticommunism, traditionalism, and libertarianism were fused into a “modern” American conservatism, that disparate ideas were fashioned into a workable ideology, and that this ideology was the tool Reagan used to remake American politics. The classic formulation of this argument is The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Nash 2006 cited under Monographs), to which there are many revisionist alternatives. Media concerns the changing role of communication, from the intellectual magazines of the 1950s to talk radio in the 1990s, and beyond. Foreign policy encompasses conservative debate on the ideals and practice of American foreign policy, moving among isolationism, realism, and neoconservatism. In the future, scholars will work through other arguments and narratives involving these branches, and new branches will surely be added.

How Planned Is “Planned Litigation”?

1984 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Wasby
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Amicus Curiae ◽  
Legal Defense

Civil rights litigation undertaken by lawyers associated with interest groups, particularly the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), is of ten described as planned” litigation. This article examines litigation by these organizations from the late 1960s through the early 1980s to explore the extent to which “planned litigation” is planned. The author interviewed both staff attorneys for organizations participating in race relations litigation and “cooperating attorneys” associated with such organizations.Elements of planned litigation discussed are litigating organizations’ choices—of areas of law on which to focus, of cases, of federal or state courts, and of amicus curiae participation—and the dynamics of litigation—including relations between staff and cooperating attorneys, litigators’ control of cases, and the effect of Supreme Court decisions on litigation strategy.The interviews reveal that much interest-group civil rights litigation is not selected deductively on the basis of previously developed criteria but instead develops inductively from cases that come to the organizations and is affected by pressure and circumstance. Counter to the view, stemming from Brown v. Board of Education, that civil rights litigation is undertaken as planned “campaigns” based on “blueprints,” it appears that much about “planned” litigation is problematic, with many constraints imposed by the actions of others and by resource problems, with the result that many deviations from litigation strategy occur. Thus much “planned” litigation is responsive and reflexive and beyond litigators’ control.

Civil Rights and Social Change: The Contributions of Interest Groups, Social Movements and the Courts

1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-7
Author(s):  
Karen O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Formal Class

The twenty participants in this seminar came from a variety of colleges and universities that ranged from major research institutions to small teaching colleges. The academic ranks and interests of those in attendance also were diverse. This heterogeneity of participants was intentional and designed to facilitate a meaningful exchange of ideas and perspectives on the topics to be discussed. Formal class sessions were held for three and one-half hours each morning. The instructor made herself available for individual discussions later each day. Seminar participants were urged to take advantage of the unique location of the seminar. It was held at the APSA convention site only a few blocks away from the Martin Luther King, Jr. birth site and the MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change.The focus of this seminar in the main was to explore the role that interest groups have played and are likely to continue to play in the judicial process. Our focus was on the federal level, particularly the United States Supreme Court. Given the varied backgrounds and interests of those attending this seminar, it was believed that such an approach would provide a broader and richer understanding of not only the development of law concerning civil rights but also of the judicial process itself.After introductions the first morning, we immediately launched into a discussion of the readings for the day. They were designed to acquaint the participants with some of the literature on interest group litigation. Interestingly, however, the focus of our attention was immediately turned to the idea of “group” and what was meant by interest group or social movement. Several participants had been grappling with these questions in their own research, and others had had extensive experience in a diverse set of groups. A lengthy discourse from varied perspectives then ensued.

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