The political roots of domestic environmental sabotage

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we demonstrate that when environmentalist niche parties compete in a given constituency over a number of elections, but continually fail to win seats, then environmental sabotage becomes more frequent in that constituency. When mainstream tactics fail, radical tactics are used more frequently. Using a new data-set on the success rates of all Green Party candidates in US states, we show that environmental sabotage occurs more often when Green Party candidates fail to win even minor offices. This is true even when we control for other political expressions of environmentalism, such as interest group activity, and when we define ‘success’ through votes not seats. We discuss the implications of this for environmental politics, for social movements and democracy, and for political violence in the US.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ben Farrer is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Knox College. His research and teaching interests focus on parties and interest groups, environmental politics, and methodology.

Graig Klein is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Binghamton University specializing in International Relations, American Politics and Research Methodology.

ORCiD

Benjamin Farrer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5889-5498

Notes

1 The authors gratefully acknowledge the useful comments of the Binghamton Comparative Politics workshop, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers. They also acknowledge helpful discussions with Jodi Dean, Alex DiStefano, Michael Flynn, and Josh Zingher.

2 We revisit this in our conclusion, where we discuss possible generalizations of our argument to other forms of political violence whose perpetrators do not share this commitment.

3 Note that any dissimilarity between the Green Party platform and the platform of radical environmentalists only works against our empirical test. If the Green Party is more moderate than these groups, then ALF, EF!, and ELF members would be less likely to feel frustrated with the failure of Green Party campaigns, and so we would be less likely to find results.

4 There is considerable evidence from the psychology of radical activists that they will turn to other tactics rather than give up completely (Farrer 2016; Kuipers 2009; List 1993).

5 This process is not unique to the environmental movement in the US; segments of the Irish Catholic population in Northern Ireland in the 1960s continually rallied around extremist tactics in response to insufficient political representation (McAllister 2004; Silke 2008). The leaderless resistance structure of some of the most prominent environmentalist organizations provides ample opportunity for frustrated activists to “self-radicalize” in this way, as the ELF encourages prospective supporters to organize their own cells rather than try to join existing ones (Leader and Probst 2003).

6 We also leave until the empirical section a discussion of the states where no Green Party candidates have run. In brief, “frustration with mainstream tactics” cannot exist where those tactics have not yet been tried, and so do not expect that these states will experience more frequent sabotage.

7 Note that for the states where no candidates ran – Kansas for example – these variables are always zero. This fits our theoretical specification: until the Green Party is perceived to have tried and failed, the likelihood of environmental sabotage is relatively low.

8 This backlash effect may exist under some circumstances, and further research may be able to test this connection, but for the purposes of our current argument we believe it suffices to show that failure rates from ten years ago, which could not be driven by backlash, can still affect sabotage rates.

9 We include the Senate score since our unit of analysis is the state but obtain similar results if we use House scores instead.

10 Whilst we acknowledge that the actions of the Democrats and Republicans may affect the Green Party, and radical environmentalists, in more nuanced ways here, we leave these questions for future work. For our purposes in this paper, we focus on the role played by the Green Party, and measure the actions of the other parties only to help us more precisely assess the role played by the Green Party.

11 We obtain much the same results if we use a year counter rather than dichotomous period indicator.

12 We include contributions in kind, and independent expenditures, and refunded donations are also included (as negative numbers), but negative expenditures are not counted, nor are other kinds of transaction types.

13 This subset is identified by using the Open Secrets coding scheme for PACs, more details of which can be found on their website.