Page 151 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Political Organizations
Groups like these exhibit as a whole five main organizational charac-
teristics: a tension within groups over devoting attention to national as
opposed to subnational policy processes; a tension between groups as to
ideological positioning; increasing institutionalization and bureaucrati-
zation over time; a history of coordination among organizations; and a
strong orientation toward treating information as a political resource.
The tension between national versus subnational policy involves orga-
nizations’ changing calculations about how many resources to devote to
policy at the national level as opposed to the state and local levels. This
tension is the product of at least two general forces: changing receptivity
on the part of national and subnational institutions to environmental
groups’ agendas and the sometimes internally conflicting logic of mem-
bership. During the late 1960s and 1970s, when environmentalism came
to the fore in American politics, government institutions at the national
level, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after its cre-
ation during the Nixon administration, were widely judged to be more
receptive to new policy. The states, on the other hand, were perceived
by most environmental groups to be poor at policy innovation and too
beholden to economic interests to respond to demands for environmen-
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tal protection. Throughout this period, most groups organized them-
selvesasnationalinterestgroupsorientedtowardthefederalgovernment,
aligning themselves with key members of Congress and committees, as
well as the suite of federal agencies involved in environmental issues: the
EPA, Interior agencies, the Forest Service, and the Energy and Trans-
portation departments, among others. It also meant that they attracted
and mobilized citizen members on the basis of national issues within
the jurisdictions of the various federal institutions. Whether or not their
assessment of conditions in the states was correct, the wealth of national
legislation and regulations produced in the 1960s and 1970s confirmed
their judgment that the national arena was productive for them.
Beginning during the Reagan administration, environmental orga-
nizations changed their assessments of where new policy could best be
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made. The hostility of the Reagan White House was coupled with what
groups perceived as a decreasing capacity of the national government to
innovate. That lack of innovation persisted throughout the 1990s, even

56 Barry G. Rabe, “Power to the States: The Promise and Pitfalls of Decentralization,” in
Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft, eds., Environmental Policy in the 1990s, 3rd ed.
(Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1997), pp. 31–52.
57
See Barry Rabe, “Power to the States,” on the “decentralization” of environmental
policy.
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