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Since 2009 the Tea Party has disrupted and deeply influenced American politics. The force of the movement has been felt not only in the three election cycles since then, but also in the development of public policy. One area where Tea Party influence has been said to be significant is in the area of environmental sustainability. As local governments have moved toward adopting environmental measures aimed at promoting sustainability, there have been some cases where local Tea Parties have emerged as aggressive and strident opponents of related policy changes. How widespread this behavior has been is unclear. In this paper we look broadly at the Tea Party movement across the country and systematically assess its influence in urban America. Based on evidence we've gathered for a number of different databases, we find that the Tea Party has not had a measurable impact on city policymaking in the area of sustainability. Moreover, we find that local Tea Party chapters generally have very limited organizational capacity to engage in advocacy. Across 50 large American cities, our findings indicate that the typical Tea Party chapter is at best a modest presence in local politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first in a series of papers reporting the final results of the Advocacy and Public Policymaking Project (http://lobby.la.psu.edu). We interviewed 315 policy advocates and government officials centrally involved in a random sample of 98 issues reflecting the full range of policy activities of the federal government during the last two years of the Clinton Administration and the first two years of the Bush Administration. In this paper we focus on the structure of policy conflict. Each of our 98 issues was conceptually multidimensional and understood in such a way by everyone involved. Policy debate surrounding the issues, however, was far more limited.. We map out the structure of policy disagreement across our issues, describing the surprisingly small numbers of distinct perspectives active on each case. Our findings help understand the causes of low-dimensionality in Washington debates. These structural features are broader than institutional design alone, and stem from the nature of the professional and knowledge-based communities surrounding the policies; the continuing nature of debates, which creates a strong status-quo bias; cost issues; and political and gate-keeping efforts. The paper is the first to lay out these dimensional structures and to describe the nature of policy disagreement and political conflict in a random sample of issues. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research offers a systematic look at how advocates' goals, the magnitude of the policy changes they seek, and the salience of the policy issues they care about shape the arguments and tactics advocates employ on a random sample of 98 issues. Our data show that the process of advocacy differs considerably for status quo supporters and challengers. Supporters of the status quo engage in far fewer activities than do challengers, and they are much more likely to make negative claims about the policy options proposed by others and ignore the virtues of the policy they support. Although the data did not reveal many linkages between salience and argument use, we did observe a relationship between conflict-expanding tactics and greater issue salience. The magnitude and type of policy change that was sought had minimal impact on the arguments and tactics used by advocates. Overall, our investigation demonstrates that there are compelling patterns to the advocacy process in Washington that may help to explain the movement or lack thereof that we observe. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]