Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States (Studies in Postwar American Political Development)

by Leah Cardamore Stokes

policies reinforce themselves over time: creating constituencies that drive positive feedback and policy expansion. This pattern is referred to as “path dependence” or “lock-in”: once a policy course is set, it is difficult to reverse (Pierson 2000).

First, I show that ambiguity plays a central role in policy change. I call this dynamic the “fog of enactment”—the gap between actors’ expectations and the policy’s actual outcome.

Second, I argue that implementation is a key step in policy feedback. Examining policy changes over long periods, we can see that ambiguity shrinks after implementation. As actors learn, they update their beliefs and come to attack policies they previously ignored or underestimated.

Third, I show the mechanisms through which interest groups try to drive policy changes after implementation. Policy changes are contingent on interest groups’ knowledge and networks, their direct lobbying of legislators and regulat...

Clean energy laws are precisely the kind of policies we would expect to lock in over time because they create new industries.

Policies that involve dramatic redistribution of wealth across society do not lock in without a long fight

This book tells the story of the clean energy battles playing out in statehouses across the country and, through it, tells us about our prospects for addressing the climate crisis.

four specific factors that increase this fog: novel policies that have not been implemented widely elsewhere; major reforms that involve complex and detailed rules; policies in technical domains; and policy areas that have overlapping jurisdictions across the state and federal government.

If natural gas leaks at a rate of 3.2% or higher, scientists estimate that this fuel source is worse than coal from a climate perspective (Alvarez et al. 2012).33 Accurate leakage rates are very hard to estimate, but it is likely that the official Environmental Protection Agency estimates are too low and that leakage may be around 2.3% (Alvarez et al. 2018).