Keywords

In these final chapters we turn to a treatment of what government does, and the social realities that embody and constrain the nature of government thinking and action. We often speak of government as if it has intentions, beliefs, plans, and fears. This sounds a lot like a mind. But this impression is fundamentally misleading. “Government” is not a conscious entity with a unified apperception of the world and its own intentions. Government is not one unified thing. Rather, it is an extended network of offices, bureaus, departments, analysts, decision-makers, and authority structures, each of which has its own reticulated internal structure. This unavoidably implies a likelihood of a lack of coherence in the “mentality” of government.

This has an important consequence. Instead of asking “what is the policy of the United States government towards Africa?”, we are often driven to ask subordinate questions: what are the policies towards Africa of the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Central Intelligence Agency, or the Agency for International Development? Further, for each of these departments we are forced to recognize that each is itself a large bureaucracy, with sub-units that have chosen or adapted their own working policy objectives and priorities. There are chief executives at a range of levels—President of the United States, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of CIA—and each often has the aspiration of directing his or her organization as a tightly unified and purposive unit. But it is perfectly plain from earlier chapters that the behavior of functional units within organizations is only loosely controlled by the will of the executive. This is part of the meaning of the idea that organizations are often loosely coupled (Chapter 6). This does not mean that executives have no control over the activities and priorities of subordinate units. But it does reflect a simple and unavoidable fact about large organizations. Organizations generally show much more internal differences of opinion and day-to-day purposiveness than a simple organization chart would suggest.

This ontological fact about government makes the relevance of the strategic action field model of organizations directly pertinent to understanding the processes and dynamics of government (Chapter 4). Actions and policies that may appear irrational from the point of view of intelligent manifestations of longterm policy and value goals are comprehensible when we understand them as the result of contending actors and factions. Coalitions within and between agencies and executive offices; decision processes that are influenced by powerful outsiders (corporations, industry groups, citizen advocacy groups, political party activists, …); and self-serving opportunistic behavior by actors at various levels within the organizational hierarchy all point to the likelihood that resultant policy choices will appear incoherent and inconsistent.

What does government do? In brief, government establishes a framework of law and policy within which society functions. Of particular interest is the government function of creating new policies to address perceived problems in society. Governments formulate policies in service of their priorities. A policy is a set of actions designed to bring about a set of social outcomes—increase post-secondary educational attainment, decrease automobile accident fatalities, end child malnutrition. Setting policy therefore unavoidably involves gathering data about the processes in question and arriving at estimates of the effects various possible interventions are likely to have. Policies, the action plans of government, may be the result of legislation or executive action through the workings of various governmental agencies, and both types of processes raise interesting issues. The implementation of policy requires the ability of government to secure appropriate behavior by citizens, businesses, and government officials alike; this challenge is the topic of Chapter 9 where we consider how government exerts its will.

Consider a few familiar examples. The War on Poverty and resulting Economic Opportunity Act (1964) was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s effort to create processes of social and economic change that would end severe poverty in the United States. The Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) were aimed at eliminating racial discrimination in public and social life in the United States. The environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s was aimed at halting and reversing the decline of environmental quality witnessed in mid-twentieth-century in the United States and the adverse effects on public health and quality of life that ensued. President Bill Clinton’s effort at reforming the Federal welfare system resulted in The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, a body of legislation intended to address what conservative critics perceived to be abuses of the existing system of social assistance. Decades-long efforts to reform the way that healthcare insurance is provided to Americans eventually led to passage of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act (2010)—with years of subsequent efforts by political actors in the opposition party to undo the policy. In each case there was a perceived social or political problem; a process conducted through agencies and executive working groups aimed at developing a policy proposal; a legislative process through which the policy is adopted; and implementation and enforcement of the requirements of the new laws.

Every step of this schematic process of policy creation raises aggregation problems of the kinds described in previous chapters. How do advocates for solutions to perceived social problems gain influence, and how do they come to prevail in official policy-making circles? How are possible policy solutions developed, and what factors determine which solution will gain primacy within the governmental process? What kinds of political coalitions and external influences shape the legislative process through which a policy framework is turned into legislation? Finally, what obstacles arise within government and between government and society when it comes to implementation and enforcement of new policy legislation?

It is apparent that there is a great deal of contingency in each step of this process. Different problems could have been selected, or different formulations of the chosen problems could have been developed; different policy solutions could have been developed; for a given policy framework advocated by a powerful policy stakeholder (the President, for example), different legislative embodiments could have been crafted with very different operational characteristics; and implementation and enforcement depend on the decisions made at a range of governmental levels about priorities, resources, and effort concerning operationalization of the legislation.

Take healthcare reform as an example. The reforms that the Obama administration fought for were plainly advantageous for a very large segment of the American population. Tens of millions of people stood to gain access to health insurance as a consequence of the reforms. Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) makes very clear the importance of healthcare for poor people in her close studies of low-income life experiences. And yet the voices of those tens of millions of uninsured low-income people played almost no role in the bitter political conflict that ensued. Moreover, the Obama plan was certainly not radical or progressive; as Norm Ornstein (2015) observed, the details of the Obama plan derived from a long line of Republican proposals deriving from former Republic Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney and Republican Senators Chafee, Durenberger, Grassley, and Hatch. However, Republican opposition to “Obamacare” was unrelenting in the House and the Senate. Conservative theories and agendas, concerted efforts by conservative think-tanks, widely disseminated falsehoods (“death panels”), and heated rhetoric instead dominated the legislative and electoral process. Eventually a weakened version of healthcare reform became law in the form of the Affordable Care Act, on the strength of straight party-line votes in both the House and the Senate. Since passage, key provisions of the legislation were reversed by the Supreme Court and the next presidential administration.

How can we attempt to understand the development, articulation, and legislation surrounding a major piece of policy legislation? It is useful to address these processes from both a micro- and a macro-level of analysis. At the micro-level, we can look closely at the factors that played a role in each stage of the process—the political calculations of the participants, the processes of policy analysis through which experts attempted to assess the probable consequences of various policy options, and the intra-governmental processes through which the policy progressed from political rhetoric to law. This is the level of analysis for which the kinds of mechanisms described in the preceding chapters are most pertinent.

We can also look at the question from the macro point of view: what kinds of macro-level factors influenced the formulation and adoption of a given government policy? Here the kinds of factors that are relevant include the broad environmental characteristics of the field within which policy-makers and elected officials function. These include political ideology, social movements (the Tea Party movement, for example), shifts in public opinion (the abrupt upward shift in acceptance of single-sex marriage that occurred in the 2000s in the United States, for example), and broad economic circumstances during a period of time (affluence, growth, recession, unemployment). International factors are also pertinent; for example, McAdam (1999) argues that the ideological competition associated with the Cold War was a critical factor in the success of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Factors like these have causal influence through their ability to shift the ways that elected leaders give priority to one kind of problem over another, how officials frame the problems they wish to address, and the political calculations they make about the advantage or disadvantage to themselves and their parties of a given policy initiative. Ideologies (e.g. business-conservative Republicans, pro-labor Democrats, social-issue Republicans, multicultural Democrats) lead candidates and elected officials to think about the world in particular ways. Movements like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street create the possibility of political damage to the elected official for making the “wrong” choice on a given issue. Economic anxiety among voters may give elected officials more reason to exercise caution in their policy formulations (for example, favoring economic and business growth over control of greenhouse gases and climate change).

Culture too is a macro-level factor that influences government policy. Sociologist Frank Dobbin (1994) emphasizes the importance of cognitive and cultural frameworks in the adoption of national policy choices in his treatment of the emergence of railroad policy in different countries. He argues that there are significantly different cultures of political and industrial policy in different countries that lead to substantial differences in the ways in which government formulates social and economic policies. “Each Western nation-state developed a distinct strategy for governing industry” (Dobbin 1994: 1). For example, the laissez-faire culture of the United States permitted a few large railroad magnates and corporations to make the crucial decisions about technology, standards, and routes that would govern the development of the rail system. The regulated market culture of Great Britain favored smaller companies and strove to prevent the emergence of a small number of oligopolistic rail companies. And the technocratic civil-service culture of France gave a great deal of power to the engineers and civil servants who were charged to make decisions about technology choice, routes, and standards. Dobbin’s work demonstrates the very great degree of contingency that exists in the implementation of public policy. Second, it makes a strong case for the idea that an element of culture—the framework of assumptions, precedents, and institutions defining the “policy culture” of a country—can have a very strong effect on the development of large policies and institutions. Dobbin emphasizes the role that things like traditions, customs, and legacies play in the unfolding of important historical developments. And finally, the work makes it clear that these highly contingent pathways of development nonetheless admit of explanation.

Executive Leadership

Executives attempt to limit the degree of disunity that exists within their span, and this applies to elected presidents, appointed secretaries and directors of major agencies, as well as CEOs of private companies. Shirley Ann Warshaw (1997) makes the case that US presidents since World War II have sought to exert greater control and direction over domestic policy, with mixed results. She writes, “It is the goal of this study to establish how recent presidents have used their White House staffs to frame a domestic policy, organize the often disparate parts of the administration in support of that policy, and build the coalitions of support necessary to move that policy forward…. The organizational structures vary from administration to administration as do the size of the units, the political and policy background of its members, and their roles in managing the general domestic policy process” (Warshaw 1997: 1–2).

Warshaw emphasizes some of the central themes of this book, including consent, collaboration, and authority. She highlights the inherent multiplicity of government—different offices, agencies, and executives possessing different interests and priorities—and the need for concerted efforts to “build coalitions of support” in order to gain a degree of coherence and effectiveness in implementing a package of priorities. “Cabinet acceptance of the legitimate authority of the White House staff therefore depends on a White House staff with clearly formed, well-articulated goals and objectives as established by the president, and similarly depends upon a cabinet committed to those goals and objectives” (Warshaw 1997: 12). She emphasizes as well, however, the degree to which disharmony and conflict characterized efforts within the White House in different administrations to pursue a coherent domestic policy. “This ever-changing role of the domestic council has contributed not only to a lack of continuity in domestic policy but often a certain chaos in the domestic policy office as well…. The absence of either a continuing structure or continuing staff in the management of domestic policy has been reflected in severe problems that each administration has faced in framing a domestic agenda and building both legislative and public support for that agenda” (Warshaw 1997: 3). She argues that the later years of the Clinton administration demonstrates a collapse of unity around the priorities of the domestic policy agenda of the president.

Policy Formulation

Much of the work of government is performed by agencies through policies, actions, and administration of relevant conduct by citizens and private organizations and corporations. Governmental agencies have rule-setting powers and powers of enforcement, delegated by Congress to permit them to carry out their assigned missions—the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration, or the Social Security Administration. Agencies implement policies under broad enabling legislation enacted by Congress. They are generally large hierarchical organizations incorporating layers of administrators and technical experts, and the eventual content of a new policy is often the highly complex result of myriad different scientific assessments, interests, and voices. The question here is a somewhat limited one: how do the agencies of government arrive at decisions? What is the role of fact-gathering, opinion-writing, and advocacy in the ultimate decision taken by the department?

The actions of government are complex in several ways. The processes within government are themselves complex and worthy of study. Second, it is also the case that there are powerful and interested parties outside of government who have preferences about the shape that policy takes, and these actors find a variety of ways of making their influence felt. Figure 8.1 gives an overall impression of the complexities of these processes. These competing systems of influence create the likelihood that policy formulation will be a turbulent process.

Fig. 8.1
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Governmental action

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Information Gathering and Scientific Assessment

Organizational units at all levels arrive at something analogous to beliefs (assessments of fact and probable future outcomes), assessments of priorities and their interactions, plans, and decisions (actions to take in the near and intermediate future). And governments make decisions at the highest level (leave the EU, raise taxes on fuel, prohibit immigration from certain countries, …). How does the analytical and factual part of this process proceed? And how does the decision-making part unfold?

Government policy usually requires a factual basis. It is necessary to gather evidence about a problem and to go through a process of evaluating and assessing available data to arrive at a set of beliefs about the problem area. Examples include the risks of nuclear power, the potential toxicity of DDT, the process of global warming, the causes of urban poverty, and the differential racial effects of the War on Drugs. We may look at this as the “cognitive” work of government—the processes through which the organizations and individuals of government arrive at factual beliefs about the policy environment. We need a better understanding of the scientific-bureaucratic processes through which governmental scientific agencies and their committees gather and analyze evidence about the problem. An important causal factor in this area of government activity is the presence of pressure and influence by external stakeholders of many kinds. Industrial groups, corporations, regional interests, and citizen groups all have an interest and an ability to intervene in the policy process. Influence extends throughout the governmental process, from fact gathering and assessment to priority-setting to writing regulations to implementing a regulatory system. Current research in science and technology policy provides an empirically grounded account of the institutional arrangements through which government scientific knowledge and policy are created.

Sometimes governments decide through solitary individuals in a position to do so. The more interesting cases involve situations where there is a genuine collective process through which analysis and assessment takes place (of facts and priorities), and through which policy solutions are considered and ultimately adopted. Agencies usually make decisions through extended and formalized processes. There is generally an organized process of fact gathering and scientific assessment, followed by an assessment of various policy options with public exposure. Finally a policy is adopted (the moment of decision).

It is clear that an important part of the substantial improvement that has occurred in aviation safety in the past fifty years is the effective investigation and reporting provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). NTSB is an authoritative and respected bureau of experts whom the public trusts when it comes to discovering the causes of aviation disasters. The Chemical Safety Board (CSB) plays a similar role with regard to the chemical and petrochemical industries. It has a much shorter institutional history—it was created in 1990—but we need to ask a parallel question here as well: Does the CSB provide a strong lever for improving safety practices in the chemical and petrochemical industries through its accident investigations; or are industry actors largely free to continue their poor management practices indefinitely, safe in the realization that large chemical accidents are rare and the costs of occasional liability judgments are manageable?

As Raadschelders and Whetsell (2018) argue, policy decisions are rarely determined by scientific evidence alone. For one thing, scientific experts are sometimes divided in their recommendations; this range of uncertainty is a normal part of scientific practice. But more fundamentally, there is sometimes an unavoidable need for pragmatic balancing of scientific and non-scientific considerations in the decision to establish a given policy, and ethical policy decision-makers need to attempt to achieve such a balance without permitting bias or self-interest to intrude into the outcome. Consider for example the need to establish policies that would resolve the Dakota Access Pipeline conflicts over the route taken by the proposed pipeline. It may be that scientific judgments about the probability of contamination of drinking water by the proposed route are strong and well supported, with the recommendation that the likelihood of contamination is extremely low. Nonetheless a sensible policy-maker may well conclude that the harm created for the public of fear of contamination is sufficiently important to justify re-routing the pipeline to avoid that fear. This case would illustrate the need for a balancing of narrow science-based cost-benefit analysis with a broader consideration of the public harms created by anxiety, fear, and discord.

Corporate Assaults on Scientific Research

Science is uncertain; and yet we have no better basis for making important decisions about the future than the best scientific knowledge currently available. However, there are powerful economic interests that exert themselves to undermine the confidence of the public and our policy makers in the findings of science that appear to harm those business interests. How should we think about these two factors, one epistemic and the other political? Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2010) explore the latter dynamics in substantial detail in Merchants of Doubt. Oreskes’ work on the politics and methods of science denial is substantial and convincing. She is an historian of science, and she has carefully traced the pathways through which business interests have exerted themselves to affect the outcome of a range of scientific debates: for example, the harmful effects of tobacco, acid rain, the reality of an ozone hole, and the reality of global warming. She traces the influence that conservative think tanks and corporations have had on the scientific debates over these issues. But more, she demonstrates that a small number of conservative nuclear scientists have played a key and recurring role in drumming up spurious attacks on the scientific credentials of researchers in a number of these fields.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists— with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts— willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger. Among the multitude of documents we found in writing this book were Bad Science: A Resource Book— a how-to handbook for fact fighters, providing example after example of successful strategies for undermining science, and a list of experts with scientific credentials available to comment on any issue about which a think tank or corporation needed a negative sound bite. (Oreskes and Conway 2010: 6)

The purpose of this strategy was clear to its creators—to create doubt in the minds of citizens and legislators concerning the quality and credentials of the scientific conclusions with which they disagreed. “The industry’s position was that there was ‘no proof’ that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it. Representatives of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee met with staff at Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, BusinessWeek, Life, and Reader’s Digest, including men and women at the very top of the American media industry” (Oreskes and Conway 2010: 16).

Oreskes and Conway make a very strong case that good scientific research on controversial issues will be drowned out by money and astute public relations strategies by self-interested corporations. And ultimately this possibility has potentially devastating results for public health and our global future, if the public and our policy makers succumb to this attack on science.

Environmental Policy Formation

Here we will consider for the purpose of illustration one part of government’s actions, the evolving story of environmental policy in the United States since 1960. This history will serve to illustrate many of the points about social ontology of government that are most important here: legislation, agency action, the role of the public’s voice, regulatory regimes, industry efforts to influence government policy, and limitations of the impact of government action in this area.

Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968. A critical step in the evolution of government policy in the area of environmental protection was the establishment of the (EPA) by executive order by President Nixon in December 1970. The EPA was to become the key Federal agency to oversee environmental knowledge-gathering and policy formulation. Various important pieces of legislation have been adopted that give guidance to environmental policy, including the clean air and water acts of the 1960s and 1970s. The formulation of detailed policies and rules to carry out these legislative acts is largely the domain of the staff of the EPA. Figure 8.2 provides a timeline for important events, legislation, and agency action during this time.

Fig. 8.2
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Environmental protection

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How were government policies on environmental issues developed and established as legislation and regulations? How did government act during this important period? What were the governmental and social processes through which new environmental policies were considered, adopted, and put into effect? Figure 8.2 gives an idea of the flurry of policies and actions taken by government during this period of several decades, and Table 8.1 provides a list of important pieces of environmental legislation undertaken during this period.

Table 8.1 Environmental legislation
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Figure 8.1 gives a very high-level view of the groups of actors inside and outside of government that influenced or created these policies. But Fig. 8.1 presents the situation as a set of black boxes, concealing the complex and intricate pathways of influence, argumentation, and power that played roles in the outcomes of each of the legislative and policy landmarks identified in Fig. 8.2. In order to get a better sense of the intricacy of these internal processes of influence and honest efforts at preserving the health and safety of the public, consider Fig. 8.3, a diagrammatic representation of one important episode of policy creation, the decision to ban DDT in 1972.

Fig. 8.3
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Banning DDT

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The decision by the EPA to ban DDT in 1972 is illustrative. This was a decision of government that eventually became the will of government. It was the result of several important sub-processes: citizen and NGO activism about the possible toxic harms created by DDT, non-governmental scientific research assessing the toxicity of DDT, an internal EPA process designed to assess the scientific conclusions about the environmental and human-health effects of DDT, an analysis of the competing priorities involved in this issue (farming, forestry, and malaria control versus public health), and a decision recommended to the Administrator and adopted that concluded that the priority of public health and environmental safety was weightier than the economic interests served by the use of the pesticide.

The DDT case study sheds important light on the question of the ontology of government. The policy adoption was the result of a messy, bureaucratic, scientific, policy-evaluation, and lobbying process that extended inside the laboratories and policy offices of the EPA, through universities where public health and toxicity experts worked, into the strategic planning of major industries that would be affected by the potential ban. At no point was the process a pure example of rational, scientific factual assessment and policy refinement; instead, there was an intertwining of the economic and political interests of outsiders even as scientific committees within the EPA deliberated about the substance of the issues. Another interesting case is the EPA’s risk assessment of passive smoking health effects in 1992 (US EPA 1992). Other examples of agency decision-making concerning science and technology follow a similar pattern.

These cases of the development of science and technology policy illustrate two dimensions of the processes through which a government agency “makes up its mind” about a complex issue. There is an analytical component in which the scientific facts and the policy goals and priorities are gathered and assessed. And there is a decision-making component in which these analytical findings are crafted into a decision—a policy, a set of regulations, or a funding program, for example. It is routine in science and technology policy studies to observe that there is commonly a substantial degree of intertwining between factual judgments and political preferences and influences brought to bear by powerful outsiders.

Ideally we would like to imagine a process of government decision-making that proceeds along these lines: careful gathering and assessment of the best available scientific evidence about an issue through expert specialist panels and sections; careful analysis of the consequences of available policy choices measured against a clear understanding of goals and priorities of the government; and selection of a policy or action that is best, all things considered, for forwarding the public interest and minimizing public harms. Unfortunately, as the experience of government policies concerning climate change in recent years illustrates, ideology and private interest distort every phase of this idealized process.

Processes of Decision-Making

Let us look a bit more closely at the primary mechanisms involved in this account of the formation of national environmental policy. It is common in political science and economics to understand decision-making in terms of a rational process in which the agent appraises his or her preferences, assigns utilities and probabilities to the possible outcomes of each action, and chooses the action that has the greatest expected utility. This is the familiar rational-choice model of decision making, and its close cousin, cost-benefit analysis.

Sociologists and cognitive psychologists alike have made it clear that decision-making is more complicated than this simple model. One of those complications is the set of defects of rationality that were so extensively studied by Kahneman and Tversky (1982) and applied to organizational behavior by Herbert Simon (1997), including different treatment of gains versus losses and over-estimates of high-stakes outcomes. But there are other reasons to believe that decision-making is more complicated and less rational than this simple model would suggest. Every decision-maker brings a set of “framing assumptions” about the reality concerning which he or she is deliberating. These framing assumptions impose an unavoidable kind of cognitive bias into collective decision-making. A business executive brings a worldview to the question of regulation of risk that is quite different from that of an ecologist or an environmental activist. This is different from the point often made about self-interest; our framing assumptions do not feel like expressions of self-interest, but rather simply secure convictions about how the world works and what is important in the world. This is one reason why the work of social scientists like Scott Page (2007) on the value of diversity in problem-solving and decision-making is so important: by bringing multiple perspectives and cognitive frames to a problem, we are more likely to get a balanced decision that gives appropriate weight to the legitimate interests and concerns of all involved.

Here is a concrete illustration of cognitive bias (with a measure of self-interest as well) in Stever’s (1980) excellent discussion of siting decisions for nuclear power plants:

From the time a utility makes the critical in-house decision to choose a site, any further study of alternatives is necessarily negative in approach. Once sufficient corporate assets have been sunk into the chosen site to produce data adequate for state site review, the company’s management has a large enough stake in it to resist suggestions that a full study of site alternatives be undertaken as a part of the state (or for that matter as a part of the NEPA) review process. hence, the company’s methodological approach to evaluating alternates to the chosen site will always be oriented toward the desired conclusion that the chosen site is superior. (Stever 1980: 30)

Stever’s central point here is a very important one: the pace of site selection favors the energy company’s choices over the concerns or preferences of affected groups because the company is in a position to have dedicated substantial resources to development of the preferred site proposal. But here is a crucial thing to observe: the siting decision is only one of dozens in the development of a new power plant, which is itself only one of hundreds of government and business decisions made every year. What Stever describes is a structural bias in the regulatory process, not a one-off flaw. At its bottom, this is the task that government faces when considering the creation of a new nuclear power plant: “to assess the various public and private costs and benefits of a site proposed by a utility” (32); and Stever’s analysis makes it doubtful that existing public processes do this in a consistent and effective way. Stever argues that government needs to have more of a role in site selection, not less: “The kind of social and environmental cost accounting required for a balanced initial assessment of, and development of, alternative sites should be done by a public body acting not as a reviewer of private choices, but as an active planner” (32).

Legislation

Much of the effort by academic political scientists in the field of American politics is expended on the task of understanding the realities of legislative processes. Gaining a majority in favor of a legislative package requires making compromises. There are often regional interests (sunbelt, rustbelt) that create differing elective interests for senators and representatives. Large business interests find their way into the legislative process through lobbying, campaign contributions, and other forms of influence over legislators.

Legislative decision-making within a democratically elected assembly has its own logic—log-rolling, agenda setting, pork-barrel politics, internal rules, the influence of powerful outsiders, and public opinion. The importance of party affiliation in Congress is increasingly large, with a rising ability of the parties to “discipline” their members to maintain unity around issues endorsed by the party (McAdam and Kloos 2014).

We might provide an abstract description of the legislator by placing him or her in a field of influence involving constituents, political party, business interests, and ideology. An earlier generation of political scientists sought to understand elected officials’ electoral calculations in terms of “median voter” theory—the idea that the most popular position will be the position at the center of the preferences of all voters in the district. But, as McAdam and Kloos (2014) and many others have demonstrated, the logic of contested primary elections has polarized electoral competition, leading to results quite different from those predicted by median-voter theory.

The role of Congressional staff is also important in the legislative process. Staff bring areas of expertise to the elected official whom they serve, and they often bring their own convictions about the direction and purpose that legislation should take in a particular issue area. (An extensive scholarly treatment of the role of staff in policy and legislation is provided in Hagedorn [2015]).

Powerful Outsiders

There are also important non-electoral actors whose interests are affected by legislation, including businesses and other economic interests. Business has substantial influence in government (Culpepper 2010). Corporations have strong financial interests in taxation, health and safety regulation, export legislation and policy, and a host of other issues affected by government policy. And they are able to express their interests through lobbying efforts, candidate campaign funds, and personal interventions with powerful government officials. Over $3 billion have been expended annually in federal lobbying efforts in the past several years, with $3.42 billion expended in 2018. Moreover, corporations and industry groups are able to wield influence disproportionate to their size through the concentrated expertise (legal, scientific, technical) that they can bring to the case they make to the government agencies that regulate them.

Pepper Culpepper unpacks the political advantage residing with business elites and managers in terms of acknowledged expertise about the intricacies of corporate organization, an ability to frame the issues for policy makers and journalists, and ready access to rule-writing committees and task forces. These factors give elite business managers positional advantage, from which they can exert a great deal of influence on how an issue is formulated when it comes into the forum of public policy formation. Culpepper refers to British Cadbury Committee, tasked to develop “best practices” in corporate governance (9), as an important example of an occasion where high-level managers had a very powerful ability to write the rules that would govern their behavior. Vice President Cheney’s energy committee during the Bush administration is another example. Informal working groups, containing a significant representation of managerial elites, have an ability to set the agenda for a regulatory regime that allows them to privilege positions they prefer and to protect their organizations from worst-case outcomes.

Consider the largest issues we face today in national politics—climate policy, cap-and-trade policy, healthcare reform, and the nation’s food system. The influence of large financial interests in each of these areas is visible. Energy companies, coal companies, insurance companies and trade associations, pharmaceutical companies, and large food companies and restaurant chains pretty much run the show. Regulations are written in deference to their interests, legislation conforms to their needs and demands, and elected officials calculate their actions to the winds of campaign contributions. And in 2010 the Supreme Court reversed a century of precedent in its Citizens United v. FEC decision and accorded the rights of freedom of expression to corporations and unions that are enjoyed by individual citizens. As a result the influence of financially powerful corporations and industry groups has become even greater.