Interest Groups And US Energy Policy

Political economics to explain the economic policies emphasize the political role in the process. An economic policy is affected by political government, party, interest group, institution and so on. Energy policy in the United States, for example, although the making body is the Congress and the administration, but interest groups also make use of direct and indirect lobbying to influence Congress decision making, and government implementation, finally participate in the formulation of energy policy.This passage analysis the process of the formation and development of American energy policy, from the point of view of the political economics, focuses on explaining the effect of interest groups, and using the 2009 U.S. energy and Security Act polling data, analysis the logic of action of interest groups and the influence of interest group donor to the result of the votes. This thesis consists of five parts.The first part is an introduction. This section describes the background and significance of the topic. And make an summary on American energy policy, the relations between interest groups and policy in the past time. It also summarizes the innovation of this paper and some problems.The second part is the formation process of American energy policy. This part introduces the system design of energy policy formulation framework, including Congress, president, administrative authority and arrangement. In addition, the U.S. energy policy process participants are analyzed, including how Congress members, the president and administration participate in the formulation of energy policy. Also the interest group in particular those related to energy policy are summarized, and focus on explaining the way that interest groups influence energy policy formulation.The third part is the development course of American energy policy. This part analysis the US energy policy development and formulation process, including the policy response to the crisis of policy, market leading policy, coordination development view of the policies and the Obama administration’s policy. Also pay more attention to the influence and effects of different participants in the making of energy policy. It can be said that the introduction of energy policy in each period are full of fighting game.The fourth part is the specific impact of interest groups on the American energy policy. This part sets the "2009 American energy and Security Act" as an example, firstly the bill background and specific terms are analyzed, then the related subjects involved in the bill include important Commission, interest groups as well as interest groups and action logic assumption to make specific explanation. Finally do the empirical analysis on the data of vote and the results show that different forms of interest group behavior patterns are significantly different, and the effect to the specific voting members are also different, more deeply, in the United States, political contributions may even play more important roles in the interest group politics than the interests of the voters.The fifth part is the important conclusions and prospect of this paper. This part summarizes the basic conclusions of the empirical analysis, find that the formulation of energy policy in the United States is actually the result of government and interest groups game. Members of the personal characteristics is weaker then governmental factors.Also the formulation of American energy policy mechanism sometimes does not match as we predict. According to the actual empirical conclusion and Sino US energy diplomacy, We prompted China to know more about foreign policy, strengthen the communication with American politicians as well as interest groups and completes the counter measures.