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addressing climate change imposes costs on some of the world’s largest corporations, the
case allows us to control for several of the factors that determine business’s political
strategy—size, profitability, and economic resources—and focus on the impact of a
single variable: senior managers’ perception of the costs and benefits of regulation. In
particular, we can see how those perceptions evolve in response to changes in the science
and in environmentalists’ tactics. Finally, because climate change has been on the
political agenda for nearly two decades, we can discern how the interaction among
business, science, and environmental activism affects legislative decisionmaking over
time.
Business and the Environment in Congress
Organized interests influence congressional decisionmaking in two ways:
through inside and outside lobbying. Inside lobbying involves personal contact with
legislators and is enormously important to shaping the details of legislation. By contrast,
outside lobbying, the focus of this essay, entails activities such as grassroots
mobilization, advocacy advertising, and media campaigns—all of which aim to influence
both public opinion and legislators’ perception of public concern (Kollman 1998).
Proponents of policy change use outside lobbying to stimulate and convey the salience of
a problem and hence create incentives for leaders and rank-and-file legislators to address
it. By contrast, defenders of the status quo use outside lobbying to prevent an issue from
becoming salient. Their goals are to create public confusion, make the costs of
addressing the problem concrete and personal, and furnish their legislative allies with
plausible counterarguments—and thereby reduce the likelihood that risk-averse
legislators will expend political capital on the issue.
Although its role in financing campaigns gives business a clear advantage with
respect to inside lobbying (Birnbaum 1992; Clawson et al., 1998), the balance of power
with respect to outside lobbying is more complicated, particularly in environmental
politics. Environmentalists have been extremely effective at defining problems in ways
that raise their salience because they bring important political resources to bear. They
enjoy the backing of most of the world’s scientists, many of whom have become
increasingly outspoken about the human impact on the natural environment. In addition,
Convention