Environmental Protection: A Theory of Direct and Indirect Competition for Political Influence

Abstract

How is it that environmental groups can have a strong impact on environmental policy but without much lobbying? This paper develops a model of direct (lobbying the government) and indirect (persuading the public) competition for political influence and finds that they are complementary. However, an increase in the effectiveness of public persuasion, or a rise of public environmental awareness, induces substitution between the two. The findings establish that the empirical phenomenon of lack of political contribution from environmental groups may not be related to financial constraints, but to their greater effectiveness in public persuasion and growing public environmental awareness. the size of its economic stake (and hence the associated lobbying effort), and the efficiency of its organization in exerting political influence. How then can we explain why some environmental groups have been very successful against polluting industries, when the latter's economic stakes seem very high (and they lobby more) and their interests are more efficiently organized? Some might suggest that the reason for the success of the environmental movement is that environmental groups have large memberships and can provide block votes. 2 However, according to Olson (1965), a large membership of an interest group is not necessarily an advantage, and it is still uncertain whether environmental groups are able to mobilize their members to cast votes based on such affiliations. This paper suggests an alternative explanation by developing a theory of direct and indirect competition between special interests for political influence rather than marshalling block votes. A primary feature of our framework is that two opposing interest groups—an environmentalist group and an industrialist group—compete directly and indirectly for political influence in a three-stage game. The indirect competition takes place in the first stage, in which interest groups exert effort in persuading the public to indirectly influence government policy. The direct competition takes place in the second stage, in which interest groups exert effort in