If I were a real economist, I could do work like this. How about you?
Do you measure up?
"Baptists? The Political Economy of Political Environmental
Interest Groups"
BY: TODD J. ZYWICKI
George Mason University School of Law
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=334341
Paper ID: George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 02-23
Date: 2002
Contact: TODD J. ZYWICKI
Email: Mailto:TZYWICKI@;GMU.EDU
Postal: George Mason University School of Law
3301 N. Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22201 UNITED STATES
Phone: 703-993-8091
Fax: 703-993-8088
ABSTRACT:
It has been argued that environmental regulation can be best
understood as the product of an unlikely alliance of "Baptists
and Bootleggers" - public-interested environmental activist
groups and private-interested firms and industries seeking to
use regulation for competitive advantage. It is now
well-understood how special-interests can manipulate regulation
for competitive advantage. Moreover, economics has provided
models of the results of private self-interest in markets and in
politics. But, until now, economists have not provided a
workable model of private self-interest by environmental
non-profit organizations, nor have there been efforts to test a
private interest model versus the predictions of public interest
models of environmental activists. Some have gone so far as to
suggest that environmental activists are motivated by a spirit
of "civic republicanism" that causes them to subordinate their
self-interest to the pursuit of the public good.
This article provides a first effort at testing the
implications of public interest versus private interest models
of environmental interest groups. In particular, it specifies
three testable implications of a public interest model of the
activities of environmental interest groups: (1) a desire to
base policy on the best-available science; (2) a willingness to
engage in deliberation and compromise to balance environmental
protection against other compelling social and economic
interests; and, (3) a willingness to consider alternative
regulatory strategies that can deliver environmental protection
at lower-cost than traditional command-and-control regulation.
On all three counts, it is found that the public-interest or
"civic republican" explanation for the activities of
environmental interest groups fails to convincingly describe
their behavior. On the other hand, the evidence on each of these
three tests is consistent with a self-interested model of the
behavior of environmental interest-groups. Their activities can
be understood as being identical to those of any other interest
group - namely, the desire to use the coercive power of
government to subsidize their personal desires for greater
environmental protection and to redistribute wealth and power to
themselves.
Keywords: environmental economics, public choice, economics of
non-profit organizations
JEL Classification: D72, K19, K23, K32
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
