Farm Lobby Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The farm lobby is a collection of interest groups representing agricultural producers in the United States. It held sway in U.S. agricultural policy for most of the twentieth century and continues to be influential today.

The political organization of farmers in the United States began with the Granger movement, which lobbied successfully in state legislatures for the regulation of railroads in the 1870s and 1880s. The movement produced several state associations and the first national organization of farmers, the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, which was founded in 1867. However, farmers’ organizations did not establish a permanent presence in Washington until World War I (1914–1918) when the National Grange, the National Farmers Union, and the American Farm Bureau Federation opened offices in the nation’s capital. Of the three peak associations, the Farm Bureau had the largest, most prosperous, and most broadly dispersed membership, and it was the most significant by a good measure.

The farm lobby rose in access and influence during the interwar period. In one notorious instance in 1921, it enlisted a farm bloc of sympathetic senators and representatives and ambushed the congressional leadership on the eve of adjournment, winning several concessions, including passage of the Packers and Stockyards Act and the Futures Trading Act. Motivated to address a postwar economic crisis, it invested most of its energy in a campaign for economic aid to its core constituency, farmers of corn, wheat, cotton, tobacco, and milk. Unsuccessful in the Republican era, its lobbying efforts paid off with the passage of the New Deal Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933. The farm lobby played a central role not only in Capitol Hill committee rooms but also in the offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in the farmer-elected Agricultural Adjustment Act committees that administered the subsidy program in the countryside.

For its first three decades, the farm lobby maintained a bipartisan posture, working with farm state representatives and senators on both sides of the aisle. However, after the Second World War, debates about the nation’s agricultural policy became politicized, and the farm lobby split on ideological lines. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy-Johnson administrations, the Farm Bureau and other conservative elements of the farm lobby supported Republican reforms in the agricultural subsidy programs that were opposed by the Farmers Union and other liberal groups. As interest groups representing producers of particular commodities proliferated, the farm lobby also fragmented. In the 1970s, the farm lobby patched up its ideological divisions, but it no longer speaks in one voice to the extent it did at midcentury. Still, the farm lobby remains a formidable presence in its domain. Since the Reagan administration, it has successfully resisted Republican attempts to curtail agricultural programs and Democratic initiatives to turn them to broader, progressive purposes—despite the dramatic decline in the economic and electoral importance of farmers.

Because of the far m lobby’s political prowess, political science scholarship has taken an active interest in it. The farm organizations were among the earliest mass-membership advocacy groups, and they are a subject of many leading studies of interest group mobilization and membership. Truman (1951), for example, uses the agricultural sector to illustrate the way destabilizing disturbances in social relations propel the formation of lobbying groups, and Olson (1971), in critique, draws on the history of the Farm Bureau to show the importance of selective incentives in the maintenance of collective action. The farm lobby’s interventions in the political process are textbook cases of the ways and conditions of interest group influence in American politics. With studies of agricultural politics, political scientists have analyzed the methods of group representation in Washington, influence of group cohesion and governmental structure, patterns of cooperation and conflict, exchanges of political intelligence and support, financial contributions to election campaigns, logrolling and coalition building, and organizational repertoires and governmental reforms on interest group access and influence.

The farm lobby also figured in the development of the pluralist model of American democracy and critiques thereof. In a classic statement of pluralist theory, Truman (1951) used the activities of the farm lobby to develop a group interpretation of American politics, depicting the political system as an equilibrium among organized and potential interest groups. In an early critique, McConnell (1953) related the decline of broad, inclusive, and democratic agrarian politics to the rejection of party mobilization and the embrace of interest group politics in the formation of the Farm Bureau. Likewise, Lowi (1979) used the farm lobby’s involvement in legislation and administration of agricultural policy as a prime exhibit of the pathologies of pluralism’s progeny, interest group liberalism.

Bibliography:

Browne, William P. Cultivating Congress: Constituents, Issues, and Interests in Agricultural Policymaking. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
Clemens, Elisabeth S. The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Ferejohn, John A. “Logrolling in an Institutional Context: A Case Study of Food Stamp Legislation.” In Congress and Policy Change, edited by Gerald C.Wright Jr., Leroy N. Rieselbach, and Lawrence C. Dodd, 223–253. New York: Agathon, 1986.
Hall, Richard L., and Frank W.Wayman. “Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees.” American Political Science Review 84 (September 1990): 797–820.
Hansen, John Mark. Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919–1981. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Heinz, John P., Edward O. Laumann, Robert L. Nelson, and Robert H. Salisbury. The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Herring, E. Pendleton. Group Representation before Congress. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929.
Lowi,Theodore J. The End of Liberalism:The Second Republic of the United States. 2d ed. New York: Norton, 1979.
McConnell, Grant. The Decline of Agrarian Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953.
Olson, Mancur, Jr. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Salisbury, Robert H. “An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups.” Midwest Journal of Political Science 13 (February 1969): 1–32.
Truman, David B. The Governmental Process: Political Interest and Public Opinion. New York: Knopf, 1951.