Ideas and State Capacity, or Business Dominance? A Historical Analysis of Grazing on the Public Grasslands

Abstract

State-centered theorists have forwarded the argument that the role of ideas and state capacity in the formulation of public policies is evidence of an autonomous polity. These theorists hold that state capacity and ideas have an autonomous and independent role in determining state behavior and public policy development. 1. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christopher McGrory Klyza, “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns: Hardrock Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy on United States Public Lands, 1870–1985,” Studies in American Political Development 8 (1994): 341–74; Who Controls the Public Lands? Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy, 1870–1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Reflective of this, statist Christopher Klyza posits ideas and state capacity as the primary factors in the development of the policy regime that manages grazing on the public grasslands. 2. Klyza, “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns,” 363–70; Who Controls the Public Lands?, chap. 5. I contend, however, that the history of the federal grazing policy regime is indicative of a business dominance perspective, a society-centered approach. 3. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1977); Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977); John F. Manley, “Neo-Pluralism: a Class Analysis of Pluralism I and Pluralism II,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 368–83; G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), and Who Rules America? Power and Politics, 4th ed. Specifically, the livestock industry, a producer group, is the most powerful explanatory factor in the development of this regime, not ideas or state capacity. Furthermore, utilizing the cases of the grazing agencies (the U.S. Grazing Service and later the Bureau of Land Management [BLM]), the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency I assail the autonomy that state-centric theorists ascribe to the state's capacity.