Ideas and State Capacity, or Business Dominance? A Historical Analysis of Grazing on the Public Grasslands

State-centered theorists have forwarded the argument that the role of ideas and state capacity in the formulation of public policies is evidence of an autonomous polity. These theorists hold that state capacity and ideas have an autonomous and independent role in determining state behavior and public policy development. Reflective of this, statist Christopher Klyza posits ideas and state capacity as the primary factors in the development of the policy regime that manages grazing on the public grasslands. I contend, however, that the history of the federal grazing policy regime is indicative of a business dominance perspective, a society-centered approach. Specifically, the livestock industry, a producer group, is the most powerful explanatory factor in the development of this regime, not ideas or state capacity. Furthermore, utilizing the cases of the grazing agencies (the U.S. Grazing Service and later the Bureau of Land Management [BLM]), the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency I assail the autonomy that state-centric theorists ascribe to the state's capacity.