The Politics of Nuclear Power: A Subgovernment in Transition

Abstract

Even before the accident at Three Mile Island, it was clear that various factors were already converging to produce significant changes in public policy toward the licensing of commercial nuclear power plants. It is the contention of this article that the federal government's role in the development and licensing of such plants from 1946 until the present may best be understood and explained in terms of a nuclear that has changed over time as the nature of nuclear energy policymaking has shifted from what Theodore Lowi has called distributive toward what he terms regulatory.' The importance of subgovernments in influencing public policymaking in the American political system has been increasingly recognized by numerous observers.2 Subgovernments are relatively closed and autonomous alliances of political actors operating in a particular specialized policy area and consist of three basic elements: an executive branch agency; the executive branch agency's clientele groups (the interest groups that benefit directly from the programs administered by the agency); and the specialized congressional authorizing and appropriations committees and subcommittees that oversee the agency's budget and programs. Even as some authors were demonstrating the usefulness of the subgovernment concept in explaining policymaking in various specific policy areas, others were exploring new ways of conceptualizing the policymaking process itself and

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