Post-Exceptionalism and Corporate Interests in U.S. Agricultural Policy

In the 1960s, scholars of American politics pointed to agriculture as emblematic of an iron triangle joining farm organizations, congressional committees, and bureaucratic agencies in a relatively closed system of policymaking (McConnell 1965). In the 1980s, this image of the iron triangle gave way to a more pluralistic portrait of agricultural policy that consisted of multiple and varied interests active within specialized policy niches (Browne 1988). In this paper, we examine the continued evolution of U.S. agricultural policy. Unlike the era of the iron triangle, agricultural policy is no longer contained within a narrow range of issues dominated by farm organizations. However, in contrast to the pluralistic image of issue niches, we find a preponderance of corporate influence in the policy process. Using an original data set of lobbying on the 2014 Farm Bill, we show how corporate interests drawn from the food industry, banking sector, and other industrial sectors actively lobbied Congress on the Farm Bill and enjoyed considerable resource advantages compared to traditional farm organizations and producer groups. We place these developments in the context European agriculture and consider how post-exceptionalism in the American context means that food and agriculture policy is increasingly indistinct from other areas of corporate political influence in the United States.