Conceptualizing and measuring environmentalism
It is well established that the scale of human economic activities, typically thought of as the
product of population and affluence (P*A), is a major driver of human stress on the environment (Rosa
and Dietz 2012). Much work remains to be done to unpack how demographic and economic scale
influence environmental stress. But we are interested in understanding better the factors that might
compensate for the effects of scale, particularly since for at least much of the remainder of the 21st
century we can anticipate scale will increase globally and in most nations and subnational units. Shwom
(Shwom 2011), in an influential argument, points our attention to politics as well as to the importance of
business decision making in shaping environmental stress. Further, research on environmentally
significant consumption shows that household decisions about consumption can be environmentally
consequential (Dietz, Gardner, Gilligan, Stern, and Vandenbergh 2009).
This suggests to us that we need a fairly broad conceptualization of environmentalism. Certainly
the “new wave” of environmentalism that emerged circa the first Earth Day focused on individuals as
both consumers and as citizens; on the actions for better and for worse of businesses; and on policy,
regulation and other government action. Thus in attempting to assess the effects of environmentalism
as a potential moderator to the stresses that come from scale, we want a broad approach, one that
includes in environmentalism not only the strength and effectiveness of formal environmental
movement organizations, but also the values, beliefs, norms and decisions of individuals as consumers
and as citizens, the actions of firms, and not only the existence of government policies and programs but
also their effectiveness. All of these things could, in principle, moderate the stress placed on the
environment.
An ideal data set would include measures of each of these factors and allow us to estimate the
relative importance of each in reducing stress on the environment. But as too often has been the case
in the environmental social sciences, our ability to conduct the analyses implied by our
conceptualizations is constrained by limits in what data are available. While there are many compelling
reasons to use U.S. states as a unit of analysis, there is a paucity of indicators of environmentalism that
are available for all states over time.
Congressional voting as a measure of state politics.
For this analysis we have chosen to use the score assigned by the League of Conservation Voters
to state Congressional delegations as our measure of state environmentalism. Since many readers are
not familiar with the logic of indicators, we want to explain our reasoning in a bit more detail than was
possible within the space constraints of the paper.
Why Congressional voting? There are two justifications for using Congressional voting as an indicator of
state politics. The first is common sense. Members get to Congress because of the support of the
electorate, but also of political and economic elites who provide funds and otherwise engage in the
political process. Thus who gets to Congress and how they vote once there are shaped by the views of
both the public and political elites. So we would expect that the votes of a Congressional delegation to a
substantial degree reflect the politics of the state. (Granted the can be considerable diversity in state
politics, but given there are at least three members of Congress from every state, the average score on
voting for the state can capture both uniformity (for example especially high or low scores) or diversity
in state politics (high and low scores of individual members average out into moderate scores).)
The second rationale is grounded in the literature on state politics. A substantial and respected
body of research has examined the link between Congressional voting and state politics (Berry, Fording,
Rinquist, Hanson, and Klarner 2010; Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson 1998). The voting patterns of
state Congressional delegations as scored by interest organizations with clear ideological positions have
repeatedly proven useful in analyses of state politics. Thus we build on this literature that demonstrates
the utility of Congressional voting as a measure of state politics, and simply extend it to
environmentalism.
Why the League of Conservation Voters score? The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) was founded in
1969. Since 1970 its “Scorecard” rates each member of Congress each year on a scale from 0-100 based
on their voting record. LCV staff in consultation with other experts select key votes in the House and the
Senate and develop the score for each member based on those votes. This practice is essentially
identical to the approach used in developing scores by Americans for Democratic Action and the
Committee on Political Education of the AFL-CIO, the scores used in the state politics literature in using
Congressional voting to assess state politics. The LCV is the only consistent source of scores on
environmental votes in Congress of which we are aware.
What does it mean?
We are using the LCV scores for the state Congressional delegation as an indicator of state
environmentalism, paralleling the use of such scores in analyses of state politics. We are not arguing
that the votes in Congress somehow directly influence state greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, our logic
is essentially a latent variable model with only one indicator of the latent variable. This might
diagrammed as below. The circle represents the latent variable we do not observe directly,
environmentalism. The two squares represent the two variables on which we have data. Since we don’t
have data on environmentalism directly, we treat Congressional voting as an indicator of
environmentalism and examine its link to CO2 emissions to assess the relationship between the latent
variable, environmentalism, and emissions. If we had more than one indicator of environmentalism for
states over time, we could use structural equation modeling techniques for multiple indicators to
account for the reliability with which we are measuring environmentalism.1 However, since
measurement error tends to reduce the ability to detect significant effects in most circumstances, and
since we find rather strong effects of environmentalism on emissions using our single indicator, it is
likely that if we had multiple indicators we would find even stronger effects.
1
In fact our score is the average of the House average and the Senate average for a given state in a
given year. If we take these as two indicators of environmentalism, they are correlated r=0.691 which is
equivalent to an alpha reliability of 0.809.
Having multiple indicators of environmentalism, in addition to reducing measurement error,
would allow us to estimate the effects of each aspect of environmentalism on emissions. Thus we
would be able to disentangle the effects of individual behavior as consumers and as citizens, social
movement organizations, business support for environmental protection and both the existence of state
and local policies and programs and the enthusiasm and effectiveness with which they are pursued.
Congressional voting
Environmentalism
CO2 Emissions
Berry, William D, Richard C Fording, Evan J Rinquist, Russell L Hanson, and Carl Klarner. 2010.
"Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States: A Re-appraisal " State
Politics and Polity Quarterly 10:117-135.
Berry, William D, Evan J Ringquist, Richard C Fording, and Russell L Hanson. 1998. "Measuring Citizen
and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-1993." American Journal of Political
Science 42:327-348.
Dietz, Thomas, Gerald T. Gardner, Jonathan Gilligan, Paul C. Stern, and Michael P. Vandenbergh. 2009.
"Household Actions Can Provide a Behavioral Wedge to Rapidly Reduce U.S. Carbon Emissions."
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:18452-18456.
Rosa, Eugene A. and Thomas Dietz. 2012. "Human drivers of national greenhouse-gas emissions." Nature
Clim. Change 2:581-586.
Shwom, Rachael L. 2011. "A middle range theorization of energy politics: The U.S. struggle for energy
efficient appliances." Enviromental Politics 20:705-726.