Density dependence and environmental justice organizations, 1970–2008

Abstract

Density dependence theory is commonly used to examine trends in the establishment of for-profit organizations. This research extends density dependence theory to the study of political organizations. Specifically, we examine the variation in the number of environmental justice organizations established each year for the years 1970–2008. As density dependence theory predicts, the bivariate association between the number of existing organizations and the number of established organizations takes the polynomial form of an inverted U, indicating that the relationship between existing organizations and emerging organizations is at first cooperative, and then competitive. However, when we control for existing numbers of civil rights and environmental organizations, the results do not conform to density dependence expectations. Multivariate analyses reveal that environmental justice organization have yet to enter a competitive stage, and instead have cooperated over the past twenty-eight years. More generally this finding indicates that for-profit and nonprofit political organizations behave differently.

Keywords:

• Environmental justice
• Organizational ecology
• Density dependence
• Time series analysis
• Political movements

Notes

1 Tel.: [phone]; fax: [phone].

2 Tel.: [phone].

3 Decentralized, interpersonal, and egalitarian environmental justice organizations are unlikely to compete with large and formal bureaucratic structures for foundation funding and resources. For this reason we limit the analysis to formal organizations to better test the organizational ecology assumption of density dependence.

4 We supplement these directories with a Google search and an examination of environmental justice conference attendees, as well as the list of national environmental justice groups compiled by Brulle, Turner, Carmichael, and Jenkins (2007), which is one of the most comprehensive available for major national environmental justice organizations. We are indebted to Robert Brulle for supplying these data to us on February 8, 2010. As Brulle notes, not all organizations in the Brulle et al. (2007) dataset have a major environmental justice focus and thus do not specifically specialize in environmental justice. Indeed, in Brulle et al's data there were only 124 “major” environmental justice organizations. We determined that 52 of those environmental justice organizations “specialize” in environmental justice according to our coding scheme and most are already selected for inclusion in our database.

5 This coding approach leaves little to no room for inter-coder disagreement about which organizations specialize in environmental justice. A more sophisticated coding approach might involve multiple coders who review each organization mission statement according to subjective notions of environmental justice. Our procedure for coding environmental justice organizations that “specialize” in environmental justice was independently correlated with Brulle et al.’s (2007) more sophisticated coding procedure of “major” environmental justice organizations, and there is a 40% overlap between methods. But we capture more organizations than Brulle et al., since we include state and local organizations.

6 39 years is sufficient for testing density dependence theory among for-profit organizations (Carroll & Hannan, 2000).

7 Data are found in Fig. 1 in Brulle et al. (2007, p. 35). These data have estimates of environmental organization founding from 1900 to 2000. We use cumulative data on founding to estimate the density of environmental groups each year. These data exclude organizational deaths, which we assume to be constant for the purposes of this analysis. We estimate the density of environmental organizations for the years 2001–2008 to be 4215. This approach is likely highly conservative in that it reduces the association between environmental density and founding significantly. When we estimate data for 2001–2008 based on previous trends, the negative association between density and founding increases substantially.

8 To further test the stability of the models we also estimate Huber–White robust standard errors. Those errors are similar to the estimates in Table 1.

9 By selecting 1970, we exclude two additional organizations from environmental justice organization founding data because they were established before 1970. One organization was established in 1950 and the other in 1963. These groups did not begin as environmental justice organizations and only later changed their mission statements. Thus, the total number of organizations plotted out between the years of 1970 and 2008 is 128.

10 More information on Communities for a Better Environment can be obtained from its website, located at http://www.cbecal.org/.