Organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are familiar to anyone with an interest in environmental protection. As activist groups, they played by the same rules for years. But in 1994, the rules changed.

With the Republican takeover of Congress, environmental groups faced sweeping changes in federal policies that threatened the enforcement of environmental laws. As these organizations intensified their efforts to meet these challenges, they also altered their electoral strategies and political spending patterns. This book traces those actions and shows what they mean for the future of environmentalism in the political arena.

While environmental advocacy groups have become bigger and better funded in recent years, so have the corporate interests that compete with them for the attention of public and politicians. The Green Agenda in American Politics offers a new look at environmental advocacy that focuses on contemporary lobbying, electioneering, and agenda setting in this new context.

Drawing on interviews with activists from a wide range of organizations, Robert Duffy describes what environmental groups actually do when lobbying officials or the public. He examines activity at both national and state levels to emphasize their growing use of websites, email, and action alert networks to conduct more sophisticated grassroots campaigns, and he shows how they are devoting more funds to unregulated forms of spending such as independent expenditure, issue advocacy advertising, and public education campaigns.

Duffy also tracks emerging trends in interest group politics and provides an overview of activism through the early 1990s. He then documents the emergence of more aggressive action after 1994, such as providing campaign services to candidates and mounting voter registration drives. He also shows how state and local groups have begun to play more important roles in the wake of the rollback of federal environmental regulations.

Brimming with new insights into interest group lobbies in general and contemporary environmental groups in particular, Duffy's book opens a new window on the influence of Big Money in the supposedly democratic electoral process.

The promise and peril of nuclear power have been a preoccupation of the modern age. Though the nuclear industry has witnessed periods of expansion and retrenchment, there are now more than one hundred nuclear reactors providing America with almost a quarter of its electrical power.

Robert Duffy now examines the politics of nuclear power over the last fifty years, relating broad trends in American politics to changes in the regulation of the nuclear industry to show how federal policies in this area have been made, implemented, and altered. He weaves a discussion of institutional change in all three branches of government into a study of agenda-setting, regulatory reform, and "subgovernment" politics, demonstrating how these forces combined to create policy change in this important area of public policy.

Duffy's work traces nuclear politics from the creation of a powerful subgovernment through the public lobby reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the deregulatory backlash of the Reagan years. He demonstrates that while policies did change in the 1970s, they did not change as much as other accounts have suggested, and that the industry continued to receive considerable federal support. The book is particularly significant for extending the discussion of nuclear policy through the Bush and Clinton years, including the controversy over waste disposal, new licensing procedures enacted in the 1992 Amendments to the Atomic Energy Act, and the effects of deregulation of electric utilities.

By providing both a description of the transformation of this policy community and an analysis of how regulatory change occurs, Nuclear Politics in America offers a new and important view of policymaking in America.