Public opinion and special interests in American environmental politics

Elise Grieg ()
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Elise Grieg: CER–ETH – Center of Economic Research at ETH Zurich, Switzerland

No 21/349, CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich

Abstract: To shed light on the political inertia around environmental legislation, I study the response of US senators to public opinion while controlling for special interest pressure. I combine data on public opinion (PO) on climate change---estimated by multilevel regression with poststratification---with campaign contributions from the extractive industries to indicate special interest (SI) influence, and use senator fixed effects, instrumental variables and the timing of senate elections for identification. PO has a strong impact on environmental legislation. The effects are different for the two parties: Republicans react to PO in election cycles, whereas Democrats are responsive through their whole term. The responsiveness of elected officials to environmental opinion is surprising: while Americans often favour envi- ronmental regulation in general, they tend to consider it as of low importance. I discuss possible explanations.

Keywords: Public opinion; campaign finance; political economy; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-pol
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