PLM W 5.1

In nature, when two types of living creatures benefit each other, they create a symbiotic relationship (e.g. bees and flowers).  In the world of politics and regulatory policy, the theory of Iron Triangles describes a social/political relationship between the bureaucracy, congressmen and lobbyists that results in the mutual benefit of all three of them (see graphic above).  Each group does some action that will help the other group, creating a lasting and unbreakable bond between the three.  In academic literature, these actors are sometimes called subgovernments.

Most policy theorists today argue that this model is too simplistic to explain all the complexities and intricacies in contemporary politics.  However, it does provide the student with a baseline framework from which to build on and give some insight into how policy is made and why it only changes incrementally or not at all.

We have learned about the Tragedy of the Commons and how livestock grazing regulations in the west (i.e. the Taylor Grazing Act) sought to stop the diminishing commons (i.e. public domain land resource values).  What the Taylor Grazing Act did was establish an Iron Triangle relationship between Congress; a bureaucracy, namely the Bureau of Land Management (BLM); and ranching interests like cattlemen and sheep associations.  The BLM, from that point forward, was primarily seen as an agency that managed livestock grazing in the West.  The passage of the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976 established the BLM as a “multiple-use” agency.  However, very little changed in how the BLM managed its grazing program.  This has recently changed though.

Below is an excerpt from a PhD dissertation called:  Drill Baby Drill: An Analysis of How Energy Development Displace Ranching’s Dominance Over the BLM’s Subgovernment Policymaking Environment.  It gives a good literature review of iron triangles/subgovernments and how they relate to natural resource management policy and specifically public land livestock grazing policy.  The dissertation makes the argument that from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the BLM shifted from a livestock grazing focused bureaucracy to an energy extraction focused agency.  We will discuss this argument and other aspects of this shift in our discussion of the New West vs. the Old West.  If you are interested in reviewing the citations or the entire dissertation, you can  click here

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Excerpt from the dissertation: 

So-called iron triangles are the classic model for describing policy subgovernments (Cater, 1964; Freeman, 1965; Lowi, 1979; McConnell, 1966; McCool, 1989, 1990, 1995, 1998). In the iron triangle model, relationships between interest groups, agency bureaus, and congressional subcommittees are described as “mutually supportive and harmonious” (Kelso, 1995). As suggested by the model’s name, the iron nature of these mutually supportive and harmonious relationships means they resist the influence of other actors. Academic research has long used natural resource policy as a lens into subgovernment behavior (Cahn, 1995; Castelnuevo, 1998; Cawley, 1993; Hage, 1994; Merrill, 2002; Yandle, 1995). And as public policy research—particularly environmental policy research—has grown more complex over time and these iron-clad relationships are now described as “open systems” (Kelso, 1995) Previously closed policy domains are now described as porous and susceptible to the influence ofcompeting players (Kelso, 1995). The increasingly complex relationships between policy actors operating within such “open systems” have been conceived of and tested by advocates of multiple models including: laissez-faire pluralism (Dahl, 1967; Truman,1971), elite pluralism (Lowi, 1979), issue networks (Heclo, 1978), advocacy coalitions (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999), policy streams (Kingdon, 1984), and punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993).

The theoretical shift from the simplicity of iron-triangles to the complexity of open-systems is illustrated in the historical domination of natural resource policymaking by large user interest groups. Charles Wilkinson (1992) describes the dominance of singular, large user interest groups in a variety of natural resource policy settings.

Critically assessing 19th and early 20th century natural resource laws, policies, and ideas, Wilkinson argues that “natural resources are governed by what I have come to think of as the ‘lords of yesterday’” (Wilkinson, 1992, p. xiii). Wilkinson notes that these laws, policies, and ideas were not always irrational, but “arose for good reason” at the time of their passage (Wilkinson, 1992, p. xiii).

In each of these natural resources settings, Wilkinson (1992) accounts for a “compounding problem,” “the capture of large interests of the laws and policies that comprise the lords of yesterday” and their ability to thwart reform through their substantial political and financial muscle (p. 22). Thus our collective understanding of subgovernment systems and how they operate within various policy settings benefits from researching the historical development of government responses to the use of natural resources. As Charles Davis (1997) notes,…natural resource issues, including water (Ingram, 1990; McCool, 1987), energy development (Rosenbaum, 1993; Jones & Strahan, 1985), agriculture commodities (Browne, 1988), timber harvesting (Clary,1986), and hardrock mining (Heclo, 1978) …were developed within a distributive policy context….[that] also spawned a protective subgovernment that restricts participation in policy decisions to public agency administrators, legislators, and interest group representatives with shared programmatic concerns. (pp. 7, 87)

Davis then asks, “How can we account for the continuing political strength of the range policy subgovernment in the face of opposition from both environmental groups and advocates of greater efficiency in government” (C. Davis, 1997, p. 87)?

According to Davis and others, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 made grazing the “dominant use” on BLM lands protecting ranching interests. It is, Davis notes, not until the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA) amending the Taylor Grazing Act by “replacing the provision identifying livestock grazing as the predominant use of public rangelands” with “the multiple-use management scheme” that ranching interests were confronted with competing land-use interests (C.Davis, 1997, p. 95). Like Wilkinson, Davis places the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 in the center of his critique of how ranching’s domination of the policy arena endures in the face of FLPMA’s significant land-use reforms.

Davis argues that, since the adoption of FLPMA, pro-grazing interests have maintained their policy dominance by maintaining their core support for grazing while gradually expanding to represent the interests of other large resource use interests including, among others, energy companies, and supporting the states’ rights and property rights political movements. While Davis notes the role of environmental organizations in advancing changes in rangeland-use policy since the passage of FLPMA, he remains relatively silent on how these groups, as well as the other large resource use interests, accommodate ranching’s continued effectiveness in protection grazing as the dominant use of public range lands (D. Davis, 1997).

Literature focusing specifically on energy policy fares no better explaining the cozy relationship between ranching and energy development interests. Academic inquiries into energy development policy, like those into other public resource policy areas, have been primarily concerned with the conflicting policy environments of energy development interests and environmental protection interests. Rosenbaum (1993) argues that “there is political symmetry to energy and environmental issues. Energy policy is environmental policy by another name” (p. 188). David H. Davis argues that “Four factors may explain the evolution of energy policy on federal lands: (1) interest groups, (2) political partisanship, (3) bureaucratic routines, and (4) economics” (D. Davis, 1997, pp. 122-124). Both Rosenbaum (1993) and D. Davis’s (1997) arguments are grounded in the symmetrical relationship between energy and environmental issues. Unlike Wilkinson or C. Davis’s inquiries, neither Rosenbaum nor D. Davis’s research explains the effects of long-dormant legislation or the mutually supportive relationship between ranching and energy development interests on the land-use policymaking subgovernment.

Rosenbaum (1993) concludes that “the risk remains great, as it always has, that national political majorities and interest coalitions will dominate national energy policies and override Western regional interests in the name of the greater national good” (p.196). Here, he suggests the potential for energy development interests to overwhelm the historic domination of grazing, or possibly the doctrine of multiple-use. D. Davis (1997) makes no similar predictions of change but, instead, concludes that a relative stability, even predictability, in the dynamics of energy policy has developed over time (pp. 146-148).  Both approaches are overly simplistic because they do not fully account for variance in political conditions and relationship dynamics affecting the subgovernment system of energy resource development.

Other authors describe how the cozy relationships within land-use policy subgovernments have been formalized and institutionalized within government agencies.  This body of literature holds that, in order to fully understand public land politics and policy, one must account for different resource management patterns, across administrative settings, within the various resource-use policy domains. Here, the key to better understanding the dynamics of resource policy subgovernments benefits from comparing patterns of realignment across governing administrative agencies and their respective resource-use subsystems.

Klyza (1996) argues that previous studies have not fully answered the puzzle of “different policy patterns in the same policy area” (p. 6). Klyza (1996) notes that this problem has been inadequately addressed by the previous literature for four primary reasons, “First, some studies have been descriptive without being theoretical (p. 6,commenting on Wilkinson, 1992) …some studies have made insufficient comparisons across policy regimes, (p. 6, commenting on Clary,1986; Durant, 1992) …[some] studies have focused on only specific agencies rather than the entire policy process (p. 6,commenting on Culhane, 1981; Clarke & McCool , 1996), …[and] many such studies lack a systematic historical perspective” (p. 6, commenting on Clary,1986; Durant, 1992).  Klyza (1996) suggests that “the key to understanding the puzzle of different policy patterns in public-lands politics is in understanding the foundation of a policy regime [subsystem] and the subsequent politics that emerge from this” (p. 7). Klyza (1996) argues that new policy regimes embody privileged ideologies that guide and constrain the actors within the policy regime. This ideology becomes institutionalized and becomes “very difficult to dislodge, despite challenges from interest groups and agencies supporting other ideas” (1996, p. 7). Yet, no one, including Klyza, has provided evidence to illustrate this point.

Klyza (1996) also argues that “[t]his institutionalization is not forever” and that given the right circumstances, “nonprivileged ideas can be victorious” in dislodging the privileged idea that guides and constrains actors within the policy regime (p. 7). Klyza notes that embedded ideas are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge, even when they are a source of friction. Klyza, however, only suggests possible hypothetical scenarios for triggering disruption. His likely scenarios range from social movements to the rise of a new land-management professionalism, agency reorganization, or expansion in administrative agency responsibilities like domestic energy development.  Klyza’s (1996) analysis of three cross-cutting privileged ideas and the responses of agencies and interest groups is that “Despite [the] challenges and cracks, the embedded idea has proved difficult to dislodge. In each of the policy regimes, the privileged idea, though tarnished, is still in place” (pp. 141-160). Change, Klyza (1996) concludes, will occur only when a “fundamental change in state and society” transforms prevailing views on the role of government in managing natural resources (p. 159). As noted in the previously reviewed literature, Klyza’s conclusions remain primarily focused on the privileged oppositional interplay between resource development interests and environmental interests.

Klyza’s (1996) provocative insights suggest a series of important, unanswered questions. Are there cases that illustrate how, when the “right circumstances” exist, “nonprivileged ideas can be victorious?” If such cases exist, does dislodging a privileged idea require a fundamental change in state and society? Might something as simple and direct as a change in the presidency, an executive order, or an executive appointment, or some combination thereof dislodge a privileged idea? Are there cases that demonstrate how events can provoke “oppositional interplay” between interest groups within the landuse subgovernment? And, if such cases exist, might examining how political conflict arising within that subgovernment, between formerly allied interest groups, advance our knowledge of the behavioral dynamics of subgovernments? Could it be that focusing our collective attention on the privileged conflict of development interests and environmental interests has limited our ability to advance subgovernment theory? The research presented in this book seeks to answer these questions.

The primary objective of this research is to advance subgovernment theory. As McCool (1989, 1990, 1995, 1998) has noted, “The phenomena of fragmentation and accommodation, and related concepts, are common themes in much of the literature on subgovernments and their principle participants” (McCool, 1989, p. 266). While much has been written concerning the expansion of competition and activity within subgovernments, the literature has not explored a number of external influences on subgovernments (Klyza, 1996). McCool (1989) suggests a need for political science to address four sets of questions in order to fully understand the role of subgovernments in contemporary policymaking. These include: (1) “what are the factors that affect the relative power of subgovernment participants, (2) what are the conditions and factors that provoke change in subgovernments, and (3) what variables affect the level of integration between subgovernments and their external environment, and (4) what are the democratic implications of subgovernments” (pp. 280-281)?

McCool (1998) also argues that we know little about how subgovernments behave during periods of conflict and proposes a framework through which researchers might identify the functional characteristics of subgovernments during periods of political conflict. McCool’s (1998) “hierarchy of conflict” framework “permits the development of a typology of conflict, and an association between types of conflict and strategies” (p.562). As McCool (1998) notes, shifting the research emphasis of subgovernments away from structure and towards identifiable behavior “provides a new definition of a sub[government]” as well as advancing the construction of subgovernment typologies and the probability of strategic responses to differing kinds of conflict. McCool (1998) offers three testable hypotheses that might “yield insight into the causal relationships between elements of the political context, and the strategies employed by various kinds of sub[governments]” (pp. 565-566).

Based on McCool’s (1989, 1990, 1995, 1998) analysis two things are clear. First, the essential questions concerning the dynamics of subgovernments when external factors foster change remain unanswered. And second, the essential questions concerning the dynamics of subgovernments when internal factors foster change remain unanswered. Therefore, in order to advance subgovernment theory, both the external and the internal factors that foster change must be addressed during a period of political upheaval.

This research identifies conditions under which subgovernment actors strategically respond to a political conflict. In doing this, McCool’s (1989) four sets of questions are addressed and empirical evidence is provided in support of McCool’s (1998) analytical framework of a hierarchy of conflict to “improve the validity and usefulness of the sub[government] model” (p. 566). The theory is advanced by explaining how subgovernments behave during times of significant political conflict and how they are affected by changes in presidential administrations.