Determinants of voting behaviour on the Keystone XL Pipeline

ABSTRACT

After lengthy debate, the Keystone XL Pipeline bill passed in January 2015. We use this event to better understand the determinants of Senator voting behaviour. Specifically, this article attempts to examine the relative impacts of political and economic influences. This is accomplished through the use of a binary logit regression model with legislator vote as the dependent variable. Results indicate that while legislators do appear to be representing their political constituency, the role of campaign funding plays an important role as well. The economic effect of such funding, controlling for other factors, is quantitatively small.

KEYWORDS:

• Keystone XL
• Keystone pipeline
• voting behaviour
• campaign financing

JEL CODES:

• D72
• D73

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the West Virginia University Experiment Station as well as a hatch fund through the Division of Resource Management. Hall would like to acknowledge general research support from the Center for Free Enterprise at West Virginia University.