The Role of Special Education Interest Groups in National Policy ...

The previous quotation illustrates some of the properties that characterize pain and loss activism: it is deeply personal to the participants, and it involves high stakes because of the direct impact of policies on affected individuals’ lives.² For example, although their children’s condition typically leads parents to be fairly sophisticated consumers of scientific information, in this case, parents’ convictions about the harmful properties of thimerosal were so strong that they were willing to deny the authority of scientific research. Given that pain and loss activism brings distinctive personal motivations into the political arena, how does it play out in the participation of organizations and particularly in their strategies in the policy-making process?³ The interest group literature suggests that organizing is a move toward the strategic use of conventional structures to affect policy outcomes (Wright, 1996). Thus, one might posit that pain and loss participation would not differ from activism caused by other motivations, as the political context dictates certain roles and processes for mobilized interests and their targets. Alternatively, it also seems logical to suppose that the personal goals of individual members might shape the evolution of the organization, and there is some evidence that collective learning, solidary rewards among members, and public expressions of moral values affect organizational development (Jesper, 1998; Rothenberg, 1992). This line of thinking suggests that pain and loss groups differ from conventional interest organizations as pain and loss activism differs from other political motives.

These intuitive hypotheses can be sharpened by systematic comparisons of pain and loss and conventional interest group behavior. For example, what is the relationship between group type and how the organization frames policy problems? To what extent do members’ political motivations differ in pain and loss versus conventional participation? How do strategies differ, for instance, regarding the deployment of expressive actions? What is relative effectiveness of pain and loss activism versus conventional interest groups in the policy-making process? In this study, I use national advocacy organizations for parents of children with disabilities and compare them with professional educator groups. Parent advocacy and professional educator groups provide an appropriate comparison