Public opinion and special interests in American environmental politics

Abstract

To shed light on the political inertia around environmental legislation, I study the re sponse 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 indi cate 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 environmental regulation in general, they tend to consider it as of low importance. I discuss possible explanations.