Stakeholder Preferences and Success at the Sub-National Level

The interest group literature has focused primarily on the impact of lobbying stakeholders on national or supra-national policies. This has left a gap in understanding how stakeholder lobbying impacts policies at the sub-national level. This is particularly problematic in the realm of climate policy in the United States (US), since states have predominantly led the way on climate policy since failure of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill, which would have established a nation-wide carbon pricing policy (CPP) program to internalize the cost of pollutants through a cap-and-trade (CaT) system. Such inactivity on the federal front, has opened space for states to take the lead on implementing sub-national CPPs themselves for the sake of climate change mitigation. This paper works to understand the interests and impacts of state-level lobbying stakeholders on sub-national CPPs in the US. It does this by conducting a case study analysis on Washington state’s CPP experience. From 2016-2021 Washington considered a series of different CPPs and each proposal was spearheaded by disparate actors. In 2021, Washington adopted a CaT system, called the Climate Commitment Act (CCA). Through a qualitative analysis, largely based on interviews, this paper works to understand the interests and impacts of sub-national stakeholders on climate policy in the US. It does this by (1) mapping out the web of stakeholder interests for the CPPs considered in Washington, (2) considering how those interests changed overtime, and (3) measuring the relative preference attainment for stakeholders in the final CCA adopted.