University of Michigan News Service – UM News

Black legislators more likely than others to vote pro-environment

ANN ARBOR—Black legislators will play an increasingly important role in shaping and deciding the fate of national environmental policy, according to a University of Michigan study that examines, for the first time, the long-term trends in the environmental voting behavior of the House of Representatives.

“For the entire period between 1981 and 1998 the environmental voting scores of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) have been consistently higher than either white Democrats or Republicans in the House of Representatives,” says Paul Mohai, associate professor at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment.

The study by Mohai, and former U-M graduate student David Kershner, will appear in the
In addition to challenging the myth that Blacks care less about the environment than whites, this study suggests that the role of Black legislators as shapers of environmental policy will only increase as they gain seniority and additional seats in Congress. The number of Blacks in the House has more than doubled since the early 1980s (18 in 1981 to 39 in 1999).

An earlier study by Mohai found that contrary to conventional wisdom, Black Americans are just as concerned, and frequently more concerned about environmental issues than their white counterparts. The present study places the focus on the influence of Black members of Congress on environmental policy. The study examined factors such as ideology, regional affiliation, and the environmental justice movement in an effort to explain racial differences in environmental voting. It found that a combination of elements play a role, and that the differences cannot be accounted for by any one factor.

The attention to environmental issues by Blacks is frequently attributed to the growth of the environmental justice movement, a grass-roots movement focused on concerns about the disproportionate burden of pollution on communities with people of color. However, the high environmental voting scores of the CBC cannot be attributed solely to the environmental justice movement.

“We tracked the number of people of color in environmental organizations and found the high level of support for environmental legislation has been around for a long time, prior to the rapid growth of the environmental justice movement,” says Mohai.

Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, the number of people of color in environmental organizations tripled from about 100 to over 300. However, over this same approximate time period the average pro-environmental voting scores of CBC members have hovered consistently around 75 percent to 80 percent.

While there is evidence from public surveys that people identifying themselves as liberals do express more concern about the environment than people identifying themselves as conservatives, ideology does not entirely explain the differences either, and regional affiliation also seems to play an important role, Mohai says.

Gaps in pro-environmental voting between Southern Congressional Black Caucus members and their white Democratic colleagues were found to be especially large. For example, during the 105th (1997-1998) Congress, the pro-environmental voting scores for Southern CBC members averaged 69 percent compared to only 48 percent for white Southern Democratic members. At the same time, pro-environmental voting scores for CBC members outside the South averaged 82 percent compared to 78 percent for white Democratic colleagues.

Mohai offers two possibilities to explain why the gap in the environmental voting record of Black and white members of Congress from the South is especially big compared to the gap between Black and white members from outside the South.

“Perhaps the environmental conditions in Black districts in the South are especially bad,” says Mohai. “A lot of the major environmental justice controversies have originated in the South. Or Southern CBC members may identify more with issues of CBC members outside the South than they do with issues of their southern white Democratic colleagues. Solidarity between CBC members overall may pull up the southern score.”

300 dpi .JPG file of the chart seen above.