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Explaining U.S. Public Lands Politics: State-Sensitive Theory or Business Dominance Perspective?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2017

Christopher McGrory Klyza
Affiliation:
Middlebury College

Extract

The fundamental difference between George Gonzalez's interpretation of grazing politics on the United States public lands in the twentieth century, as well as his other scholarship on public lands politics, and my own is our macrotheoretical approach. Gonzalez makes use of what he terms a business dominance perspective, “which holds that producer groups in conjunction with economic elites dominate federal policy making.” I, in turn, use a state-sensitive/pluralist approach, which Gonzalez refers to as a state-centered approach. Not surprisingly, we offer differing explanations of the same policies. Before addressing the specifics of his article, I will focus on the differences of our theoretical approaches and what I contend are his misunderstandings of a state-sensitive approach.1. George A. Gonzalez, “The Conservation Policy Network, 1890–1910: The Development and Implementation of “Practical” Forestry,” Polity 31 (1998): 269–99; Gonzalez, Corporate Power and the Environment (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Christopher McGrory Klyza, “A Window of Autonomy: State Autonomy and the Forest Service in the Early 1900s,” Polity 25 (1992): 173–96; 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; Klyza, Who Controls Public Lands? Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policies, 1870–1990 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2001 Cambridge University Press

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