Madison's Dilemma and the Advocacy Explosion

Federalist 10:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power ... But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

The Expansion of Interests

Changing demographic makeup:





New types of businesses and jobs

Stock ownership (St. Louis Fed):




POLICIES MAKE POLITICS:  

• Compliance Officers
• Affirmative Action
• Title IX Administration

Diminished Barriers to Association

Tocqueville (Lawrence/Mayer ed., p. 518):

It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and unite. 

Trade and Professional Associations

• The IRS recognized 63,866 trade and professional associations in FY2016.
• Examples
• About a quarter of US workers need an occupational license, up from about 5 percent in the 1950s.

Labor Unions

• 

Non-economic

• The IRS recognized 1,237,094 charitable and philanthropic organizations in FY2016