The Ecology of Environmental Association: Density, Spillover, Competition, and Membership in Sierra Club, 1984-2016

ABSTRACT

What factors affect the size of advocacy organizations? Some theories suggest that the existence of political opportunities, resources, and grievances in a locality influences advocacy organization size. In this article, we advance an ecological approach to the study of advocacy organizations, arguing that the presence of other collective actors in a locality may also impact the size of advocacy organizations. Analyzing cross-sectional, time-series data on membership in the Sierra Club from 1984 to 2016, we find evidence for the positive role of environmental organization density, but the deleterious effects of competition from labor unions and a state’s Republican Party, on the number of Sierra Club members in a state. Furthermore, we report mixed evidence that a state’s economic resources and environmental grievances affect membership in the Sierra Club. The findings hold significant implications for the study of advocacy organizations, social movements, and contentious politics more generally.

Acknowledgments

This article was previously presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, GA, and the 2019 Mobilization Conference on Social Movements and Nonviolent Protest in San Diego, CA. We thank Steven Brechin, Riley Dunlap, Andrew Fullerton, David Hess, Larry Isaac, Rachael Shwom, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for providing helpful feedback. The two authors contributed equally to this article; authorship is listed in alphabetical order.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Among U.S. environmental organizations, the Sierra Club is currently largest in staff size, third largest in membership, and fourth largest in terms of budget (Inside Climate News 2015).

² Many of these criticisms have been addressed in subsequent studies. For example, as Snow et al. (1998) have argued, many social movement theorists underestimate the extent to which individuals become accustomed to everyday life despite discord in the world; breakdowns in society might play a role in the emergence of social movements when individuals’ everyday patterns have suddenly been disrupted. Furthermore, although the source of grievances is often the subject of great uncertainty organizations can make grievances more salient through their efforts to describe the source of injustices and suggest remedies to those injustices (Benford and Snow 2000).

³ Additionally, using more recent polling data, Lewis and Reunig (2020:para. 10) have found that “active union members are actually more Republican than non-union members.”

⁴ For example, in 1994, there were noticeable spikes in Sierra Club membership in states such as Hawaii, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. During that year, Sierra Club was mobilizing voters in several states to speak out or vote against proposed “takings” laws that would have “required taxpayers to compensate developers for any restrictions on their property” (Sierra Club 1995).

⁵ The nonsignificance of the Democratic governor variable is likely due to the fact that some states that have many Sierra Club members and that routinely vote for Democratic presidents, such as California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Vermont, have a history of frequently electing Republican governors. Republican governors in such states often distance themselves from the more extreme anti-environmental-reform messages of the national Republican Party. Thus, this variable is a less useful indicator of a state’s political climate or political opportunities.

⁶ We do note that, in additional models (not shown here), we used forward and moving regressions (Griffin and Isaac 1992; Isaac and Griffin 1989) to assess whether the negative association between union density and Sierra Club membership was sensitive to the specific beginning (1984) and end (2016) points we use in this study. We find continued negative associations between union density and Sierra Club when we use later beginning points and earlier end points, although our coefficients do weaken when we use beginning points beyond the 1980s. This suggests that efforts to forge blue-green coalitions between labor unions and environmental organizations might have proven helpful (Mayer 2009; Obach 2004; Robinson 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan S. Coley

Jonathan S. Coley received his PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University and is an associate professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. He is currently deputy editor of The Sociological Quarterly. His research focuses on social movements, politics, religion, education, and the environment. His previous work has appeared in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Mobilization, Social Movement Studies, and Environmental Politics.

Quan D. Mai

Quan D. Mai received his PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University and is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University. His research interests focus on social inequality, work, race, social movements, and the environment. His work has been published in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Science & Medicine, and Work and Occupations.