Who influences the policymakers?
Is influencing the influencers part of your climate advocacy campaign? It should be.
Fact: Certain people have an outsized influence over policymakers due to their political, social, or financial clout.
Policymakers are constantly being pulled in a million directions, and their attention is highly sought after. No matter what level of government they operate at, all policymakers respond to a few basic categories of incentives:
electoral success
power
a sense of democratic duty
and personal values
The salience of these incentives will fluctuate between individuals due to personality or circumstance. Some members of Congress are simply more driven by own values than others (e.g. an Evangelical Christian), whereas second-term U.S. presidents have no personal electoral incentives because they are term-limited.
As advocates, it’s our job to leverage what we know about policymakers’ incentives to help nudge them toward our desired outcome.
Our understanding of which incentives matter most provides useful clues about which people or institutions have the ear of a policymaker. If I want to persuade my U.S. senator to support a bill, I can ask myself:
Who might be a stepping stone toward getting closer to power?
Who might be able to fund their next campaign?
Who has their finger on the pulse of public sentiment in their district?
Who can make them look good, or provide them an easy policy win?
Who espouses their values and will make them feel like they embody those values?
Below are some basic examples of how we might visualize the sphere of influence around a target policymaker. In purple, you’ll see some common categories of highly influential people (we call these people “key stakeholders” or “key influencers").
By strategically connecting with key influencers, we as climate advocates can prompt them to advocate on our behalf. While reaching out directly to policymakers , as constituents in their district, is also an effective advocacy tactic, moving a policymaker to act requires a combination of tactics that send different messages from different angles. A key influencer’s voice carries a lot more weight than any anonymous member of the public, so their opinions can make or break a climate advocacy campaign.
So, are you ready to level up your impact contacting a key influencer? We have a playbook for that!
And if you want to try your hand at making a basic influencer map like the examples above, we have a playbook for that, too!
Featured photo by mona Masoumi on Unsplash.
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