Friends or Foes? How Social Movement Allies Affect the Passage of Legislation in the U.S. Congress*
This article considers the role of social movement allies in Congress in advancing proenvironmental legislation. We argue that compared to sponsors of legislation who hold moderate views, sponsors with extreme ideological positions will be less likely to produce legislation desired by the environmental movement. We also argue that protest and organizational advocacy by constituents will increase the rate at which sponsors enact environmental legislation. Using event history techniques that follow over 12,000 environmental bills from 1973–1996, we find support for the argument that environmental bills are more successful when sponsored by legislators who have environmental voting records closer to the median voter in Congress, compared to bills sponsored by representatives holding more extreme positions. We also find that the number of environmental lobbyist organizations has a positive effect on the speed of enactment of environmental legislation, but that protest by constituents does not affect the speed of the bill's passage.
Contributor Notes
* NSF Collaborative Grants SES-0620577, SES-9911296, and SES-9709356 to the first two authors supported this research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Denver, Colorado. All of the authors would like to thank Madison Bell, Brian Cook, Jonathan Haynes, Chandler Johnson, Thomas Scher, John Scott, Wenkai Kay, Vanessa Gaines, Chelsea Barabas, Liz Warburton, Denny Won, Rosie Winn, Chuong Phan, and Noona Oh for their excellent research assistance. In addition, we thank Bob Brulle, Frank Baumgartner, and John Wilkerson for their expert advice in helping us select legislation topics. We also thank Bob Brulle for sharing his data on lobbyist organizations with us. We also thank Paul Burstein, Keith Krehbiel, Andy Walder, and Jonathan Woon for providing useful suggestions on earlier drafts.
† Susan Olzak is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. Sarah A. Soule is Professor in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Marion Coddou is Institutional Research and Assessment Analyst at Stanford University. John Muñoz is a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Sociology at Stanford University.