The Nursing Profession Viewed as a Political Pressure Group: Selected Review of the Literature

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The purpose in this paper is to analyze the extent to which organized nursing can be considered a political pressure group. The development of the paper, therefore, necessitated that the literature be reviewed from two perspectives: What are the critical aspects of pressure group behavior? And what evidence is there that organized nursing resembles a pressure group? In the context of this paper, "political" refers to what David Easton (1965) called " the authoritative allocation of values for a society", that is, an analysis of how professional nursing organizations can influence governments in the exercise of coercive power to achieve the ordering of beliefs, goods, and services that cannot be attained through the economic or the social systems of the society. Pressure groups are assumed to be integral to the functioning of the public policy-making system in Canada now and in the past. Recent Canadian writers1 argue that the number of pressure groups is increasing with the trend to increased complexity in the social and economic system, the vast technological changes in the field of information, and the pervasive and powerful influence of governmental policy. These factors serve, as Holtzman (1966) observed "... as a centripetal force, continuously drawing groups into the political sphere" (p. 3).