Reconsidering the patterns of organised interests in Irish policy making

Abstract

Set in the context of the literature on patterns of organised interests in Western Europe, this article has two objectives. The first is to examine the policy-making process when Irish state enterprises were sold and to characterise this process in light of three different theoretical patterns, namely pluralism, corporatism and elitism. The second objective is to explain this characterisation while situating the findings in the Irish policy-making literature. The first main argument is that given the predominant role of economic actors that directly influenced state actors, coupled with the relative absence of social actors including organised labour, the evidence suggests the importance of the ‘elitist’ school in explaining the privatisation policy-making process. The second main argument is that in order to understand why elitism was manifest in privatisation policy-making, attention must be focused on the larger institutional structure whose dimensions are defined by developments at both the supranational and domestic levels. The study further argues that even though the evidence points to the importance of ‘elitism’ in privatisation policy making, the findings are not necessarily incommensurable with ideas in the pre-existing literature highlighting the importance of corporatist arrangements in Ireland in other policy areas. Rather, it is concluded that different patterns of organised interests many co-exist in different areas of economic policy making precisely because of the varying institutional dynamics over time.