Page 196 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

the interests of labour against those of capital. This frequently
brings unions into conflict, sometimes of a violent nature, with
government and the repressive apparatus of the state. Another form
of subordinate organisation is the single-issue or pressure group,
which exists to campaign on a particular issue of special import-
ance. The pressure group, too, will often find itself confronting
established power, challenging positions which are dominant. This
they will typically do from a ‘resource poor’ position, compelling
them to find ways of participating in and contributing to public
debate which do not require material or cultural ‘capital’. For
such groups, the use and manipulation of the media to com-
municate political messages is potentially the most effective way of
achieving this intervention, though even if media access is realised,
it imposes many limitations on the form and content of that
message.
Pressure groups, unlike trade unions, comprise more or less
broad cross-class coalitions of individuals, united in their readiness
to act collectively in pursuit of a limited political objective (some-
times around a single issue, such as the poll tax of the 1980s)
(Simmons and Mechling, 1981). They emerge as reactions to
particular historical conjunctures, and usually decline or disappear
when these conditions change. Where trade union action focuses on
various kinds of obstruction of the production process, with the
media used as a device for communicating to and negotiating with
a variety of constituencies (union membership, employers, the
public, etc.) pressure groups are more concerned with symbolic
demonstrations of concern about, or opposition to, what are
viewed by its members as undesirable social and political trends.
Thus the international peace movement, which we cite as a case
study in this section, emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as
a response to what were perceived by many citizens in the US and
Western Europe as a disturbing deterioration in the NATO–Warsaw
Pact relationship, and a corresponding increase in the likelihood of
nuclear war.
The ‘nuclear issue’, having been high on the political agenda in
the 1950s and early 1960s, lay dormant for many years, reflecting
the period of relatively stable relations between the US and its allies
and the Soviet Union, which came to be known as détente (McNair,
1988). With the rise of the radical Right in Britain and the US at
the end of the 1970s, however, and the expanded military budgets
and heightened anti-Soviet rhetoric which accompanied that rise,
the anti-nuclear movement once again began to grow. In Britain, in

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