Business and Environmental Policy: Corporate Interests in the American Political System

Abstract

Business and Environmental Policy: Corporate Interests in the American Political System. Edited by Michael E. Kraft and Sheldon Kamieniecki. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 372p. 25.00 paper.Perhaps nowhere has more rhetorical heat been generated amid less empirical light than on debates over the influence of business on public policy. Moreover, researchers tackling this important question systematically reach dissimilar conclusions. No one doubts that business influences public policy. At issue is the extent of its influence relative to other actors. In the tradition of Charles Lindblom's classic Politics and Markets (1977), some recent scholarship has found that business holds a privileged position in policy debates because of its unparalleled resources and centrality to the nation's economic prosperity (e.g., see Kay Schlozman and John Tierney, Organized Interests and American Democracy, 1986; David Vogel, Kindred Strangers, 1996; Richard Lehne, Government and Business, 2001). Others tread more in the tradition of Raymond Bauer, Lewis Dexter, and Ithiel de Sola Pool's 1963 classic, American Business and Public Policy, finding that business is constrained and increasingly on the defensive amid an explosion of politically and media-savvy interest groups (e.g., see Mark Smith, American Business and Political Power, 2002; Jeffrey Berry, Interest Group Liberalism, 1999; Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leach, Basic Interests, 1998).