Breaking ranks: business fragmentation over climate policy reforms
Nikolai Drahos
What the paper says
Abstract Patterns of business opposition and support shape the pace and scope of environmental policy reforms. This article develops a theory of firm and business coalition position-taking that explains business unity and division over environmental policy. I argue that “coalition splintering”—divergent policy positions within a business coalition—is most likely when low-adjustment cost firms are under intense pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure over an environmental issue. Pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure influences firms’ genuine preferences for environmental policy when firms see environmental regulation as reputation-enhancing for their industry, and provides reputational benefits to firms willing to take a policy position in favor of regulation. However, powerful dynamics within business coalitions encourage unified opposition to environmental policy: firms want to maintain an effective business coalition and their influence within it given their engagement in multi-domain, multi-round policy processes, and can consequently be reluctant to break ranks to support environmental policy. Unified business support for environmental policy occurs when pro-regulatory stakeholder pressure and the inevitability of policy reform shift oppositional members of a business coalition to positions of strategic support. I substantiate my theoretical model using an original case study of oil and gas company position-taking on federal methane regulation in the United States.
2 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10 |
| M · momentum | 0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.