US climate policymaking under the hegemony of growth

The emerging field of American Political Economy (APE) distinguishes fundamental attributes of the American political system which help explain the balance of power and organization of politics in the United States (US) (Hacker et al. 2021). Findings shared in this paper speak to this emerging field by demonstrating how the hegemony of growth (Schmelzer 2016), understood as a central feature of American capitalism, could likewise be conceptualized as fundamental to the APE. This paper demonstrates the centrality of the hegemony of growth in US policymaking by considering the emergence and evolution of “green” growth as a central tenant of US climate policymaking. The paper explores this topic through both a theoretical and empirical analysis. First, literature on the hegemony of growth (Schmelzer 2017, 2016; Collins 2000; Yarrow 2010; Lane 2015) is considered through a neo-Gramscian lens, to situate growth as a “common sense” aim of the federal government in US policymaking (Hoare and Nowell-Smith 2005). Then, a link between the hegemony of growth and “green” growth as a policy strategy to mitigate climate change is made. This theorization is complimented with an empirical analysis of proposed, US, federal climate policy bills, to track the temporal emergence and evolution of “green” growth as an approach to US climate policymaking. This is done by operationalizing the concept of “green” growth to then conduct a quantitative text analysis of proposed US federal climate policy bills which tracks the emergence and proliferation of this policy approach to climate change mitigation. Bills are included in the study following a bottom-up delineation of the climate policy mix (Ossenbrink et al. 2019). The analysis is conducted by employing R Studio packages (including Quanteda (Benoit et al. 2018) and stringr (Wickham 2022)) and base features. Collectively, the empirical and theoretical analysis of this paper demonstrates the prevalence of the hegemony of growth in the APE, and the role this plays in climate policymaking.