GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

26THE POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTIONby political officials drawing in broader public concerns and competing interestgroups, or does the ownership and leadership of corporate America determinethe state’s agenda and how that agenda is addressed?BUSINESS POLITICAL BEHAVIORPLURAL ELITISMUp to this point in the discussion, I have written about business politicalpower in general terms, and the relationship of the state, in broad terms, toeconomic elites. What specific form does business political behavior take,however, and what is the precise relationship between economic elites andgovernment? Two ways to characterize business political behavior and therelationship of economic elites to the state are (1) plural elitism (Manley1983; McFarland 1987; 1993; 2004; Lowery and Gray 2004) and (2) economicelite theory (Lamare 1993; 2000; Barrow; 1993, chap. 1; Domhoff 2002). 5According to the plural elite position, business political behavior is specialinterest politics. In other words, corporate firms’ political activity islargely channeled through such narrowly construed organizations as businesstrade organizations, and their focus is largely their immediate political andeconomic self-interest (McConnell 1966; Grossman and Helpman 2001).Nevertheless, business groups are able to dominate those policy areas thatcorrespond closely with their specific interests. This is because of the distributionof costs and benefits associated with participation in the policymakingprocess (Edelman 1964; Olson 1971), as well as because of business’s commandof the campaign finance system (Schlozman and Tierney 1986; Clawsonet al. 1998; West and Burdett 1999), and businesspeople’s control of society’sproductive forces (Lindblom 1977).It is within this context of business firms and trade associations championingtheir narrow interests that public officials construe and enact broadpolicy proposals as indicated by the state autonomy/issue networks model. Inthis fragmented political milieu, Charles O. Jones (1975), for example, arguesthat political elites engaged in speculative augmentation to formulate and passthe Clean Air Act of 1970, whereby elected officials sought to outdo eachother in the writing of this act to capture the increasing environmental vote.This political behavior was facilitated by the pro-environment social movementof the late 1960s and early 1970s (Tarrow 1994; Carter 2001). EchoingRobert Dahl’s (1959) claim that “differences in the political behavior of businessmenmay be almost as significant as similarities” (16), Bryner (1995), inhis analysis of the formulation and passage of the Clean Air Act of 1990,makes specific reference to the putatively fragmented nature of business politicalactivity and how this allowed the act to reflect multiple perspectives. Hewrites that: