INTRODUCTION

In the face of growing concern over species extinction rates, national and international decision-making bodies have become increasingly aware of the need to establish effective, efficient policies to protect endangered species and their habitat. The task faced by these policy makers is complicated by the fact that policies and institutions may not function in practice as their creators intend. Political forces and human nature may yield patterns in the administration of such policies that are at odds with official doctrine. Political-economy theory describes the sorts of patterns one may expect to see in practice, and even investigates whether the influence of politics over policy can be expected to be a good thing. Citizens, scholars, lawmakers, and administrators can use the ideas that have emerged from this field in their attempts to anticipate, and later quantify, some elements of the divergence between policy de jure and de facto.

This chapter illustrates how classic political-economy theories are relevant to understanding some aspects of how endangered species policies play out. As part of that exercise, it describes three empirical studies of part of the administration of the United States' Endangered Species Act (ESA). These studies serve as examples of the kinds of empirical work one might do in order to quantify the political-economic forces at work in a policy arena, and mine the information about policies those forces implicitly provide. They also provide particular insight into the role played by political pressure in the process by which species are added to the endangered species list in the United States, and into the costs and benefits associated with those listings.