States Divided: Partisan Polarization and Environmental Protection

• In Event: Partisan Politics in Environmental Policy

Abstract

Scholars have documented increasingly divergent attitudes about climate change among elites and members of the public from the two major American political parties. We do not know, however, the extent to which this dynamic is mirrored within state publics or state parties, or whether polarization is more pronounced for climate change or extends across the slate of environmental issues. This gap is conspicuous, because the states play a critical role in enacting and implementing environmental policy. Beyond the environmental-policy arena, there is a debate over how the parties' issue positions develop, and this debate centers on whether this is a bottom-up or top-down process. The environment makes a felicitous case for studying this process, and leading explanations for the changing Republican party's position on environmental protection center around powerful donors from the oil and gas industry. This explanation remains incomplete without state-level information about public and elite views. In this paper, I compile hundreds of survey responses and adapt Caughey and Warshaw's (2015) Bayesian estimation method to measure changing public support for environmental protection among the state parties' public bases, from the late 1970s through 2016. The data set serves as a new and valid measure of public views about environmental protection at the state level and over time, for which prior scholars have relied on proxy measures like interest group membership and broad measures of ideological liberalism. I next use these data to assess the changing explanatory power of regional differences, partisanship, and economic considerations in driving public support for environmental protection. I show that regional differences in public views about environmental protection have declined, with the exception of the West, whereas state publics have sorted more cleanly into partisan camps in every state. I also find that economic tradeoffs have increased in their importance for shaping Americans' environmental views. The latter finding brings clarity to an ongoing debate about whether and how the public considers economic progress and environmental protection as tradeoffs. These data provide a crucial foundation for assessing the evolution of the state and national parties' positions about environmental protection, and exploring the elite rhetoric that may explain the shifting drivers of public environmental preferences.

Author

• Parrish Bergquist, Yale University