https://orcid.org/0009-0009-8757-7489
Figures
Abstract
What motivates members of the U.S. House of Representatives to support legislative action (LA) on climate issues? Although the U.S. Congress has passed very few climate bills in the last 20 years, there has been a substantial number of LAs in the form of votes on bills, resolutions, and amendments. Because climate issues might not get legislative traction on their own, we examine whether linking them with other salient environmental issues changes how legislators vote on climate-focused LAs (C-LAs). Substantively, we examine whether linking climate with clean air, water pollution, environmental justice, and transportation might change House members’ votes. We analyze House votes on climate change LAs as reported by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). For the 2007–2021 period, LCV scored 406 votes and identified 77 of them as C-LAs. Our regression analysis of the votes of 435 House members on 77 LAs suggests that all else equal, while climate issues without issue linkages diminish legislative support, C-LAs attract votes when they are linked with clean air and environmental justice. However, issue linkages could also backfire: C-LAs linked with water and transportation diminish legislative support.
Citation: Morton K, Dolsak N, Prakash A (2024) Issue linkage and climate votes in the U.S. House of Representatives, 2007–2020. PLOS Clim 3(9): e0000440. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000440
Editor: Jamie Males, PLOS Climate, UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND
Received: February 21, 2024; Accepted: August 9, 2024; Published: September 25, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Morton et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: Data is publicly available via Harvard Dataverse https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BYPYUW.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction
Evidence of anthropogenic climate change has been mounting for years. Recognizing the global challenge, countries signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, but the U.S. did not ratify it. Moreover, in the last 25 years, the U.S. Congress has not passed any major climate bills until the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Yet this legislative gap should not be interpreted as a lack of interest in the U.S. Congress on climate issues because the U.S. House of Representatives has engaged in climate-focused legislative action (C-LA) in other ways. We define a “legislative action” (LAs) as a vote on a bill, resolution, amendment, or set of amendments to capture a broader set of actions that signal the legislative intent and policy preferences of House members. For example, House members have inserted climate projects into other legislation and proposed climate amendments in the omnibus appropriations bills.
LAs provide House members the opportunity to signal their support for pro-climate action. Outside groups closely follow LAs, as they assess the extent to which House members support their cause. For example, LAs allow environmental groups such as the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) to evaluate House members on their votes on C-LAs. The LCV scores are an important signal to various stakeholders who might have strong preferences about climate issues. These stakeholders may not be able to evaluate House members on this dimension themselves because they lack information on how House members have voted on climate issues. If members perceived voting to be costless, we would expect a very large number of members to cast pro-climate votes to win the approval of pro-climate groups. However, in U.S. politics, climate change is a polarizing issue and motivates both pro- and anti-climate groups to mobilize. If House members perceive that their support for C-LAs might mobilize anti-climate groups against them, they might be hesitant to vote.
We explore this voting dilemma by examining whether pro-climate votes depend on what types of other issues the C-LA is linked with. The intuition is that when climate votes also address other issues, the salience of the LAs with these voters might increase and the LAs might draw more support. Or, linking climate with some other environmental or non-environmental issues, might allow the House members to claim that they were voting for the non-climate issue that their constituents support, instead of climate change which is polarizing. This is probably why the most important climate law enacted in the United States ever, the Inflation Reduction Act, does not have a climate label. The reason is that its chief sponsor, Senator Joe Manchin, represents the state of West Virginia where climate change is a taboo topic. However, inflation reduction gets bipartisan support, even in West Virginia.
Not every issue linkage has positive political payoffs for House members. Some linked issues might be polarizing or invite backlash from organized interest groups. Hence, inserting them in C-LAs could become a sort of poison pill.
Substantively, we study the linkage of C-LAs with four other issues with environmental dimensions: clean air, water pollution, environmental justice, and transportation. The reason is that these issues resonate directly with the public. Some create local benefits as opposed to the global public good of climate mitigation, while others may impose local costs in terms of economic disruption. Thus, linkages with these issues might enhance or diminish the political appeal for House members who are evaluating a given C-LA.
Clean air and water regulation are both important issues in the U.S. environmental governance system, but historically, far greater political attention has been devoted to air pollution than water [1]. This could be because of greater visibility of air pollution as opposed to water pollution. In recent years, however, access to clean water has become an important political issue given the prolonged droughts in the Western United States, irregular rainfall in the Midwest, and fluctuations in water flows in the Mississippi, along with egregious scandals such as Flint which shone the spotlight on water pollution issues. However, at the same time, water issues draw strong opposition from well-organized industrial sectors such as agriculture, meat, dairy, and mining.
Environmental justice is another highly politically salient issue. Historically, it was largely discussed in the context of toxic waste exposure and cleanup [2]. Increasingly, however, different dimensions of justice in terms of the unequal distribution of climate costs and benefits across communities, which tend to mimic existing socio-economic and racial disparities, are now mainstreamed in climate discussions [3–6]. Furthermore, the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has enhanced attention on racial disparities in U.S. environmental policy [7].
Finally, we examine the case of transportation, which affects the day-to-day quality of life at the local level, particularly in urban areas and their suburbs and exurbs [8, 9]. It is an issue closely linked to infrastructure, an important issue for many U.S. voters [10].
In terms of our empirical strategy, we analyze House votes on C-LAs as categorized by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). Many interest groups regularly rank the legislative performance of House members on specific dimensions. Among environmental groups, LCV is most prominent because it releases voting scorecards each year for every LA, be it a bill, resolution, or amendment, that reaches the House floor for voting. The scorecard categorizes each vote into one or more issue areas. It establishes the pro-environment side for every LA (either yes or no, depending on the content) and then records each House member’s vote. At the end of the year, the pro-environment votes on every LA are summed up and used to determine each legislator’s LCV score.
In 2007, LCV scorecards started including climate change as one of the issue areas. Hence, we examine legislative votes for the period-2007-2021. LCV scored a total of 406 environmental votes during this time. It designated 77 as “climate change LAs,” because they are directly related to global warming and increasing climate resilience for communities and wildlife. We examine the individual legislator’s vote on 77 LAs between the period 2007–2021. Each LA is examined for all 435 legislators, which we compiled into an original data set leading to over 28,799 observations.
Analyzing U.S. House of Representatives voting provides an excellent opportunity to explore how issue salience might influence legislative votes [11–13]. Members of the House serve a 2-year term and seem to be always in a permanent campaign mode [14], as opposed to Senate members who serve a 6-year term. Thus, House members can be considered more highly responsive to their districts; indeed, electoral incentive research suggests that House members consider constituent preferences in deciding their voting positions on various LAs. Voting records are often used in election campaigns both by incumbents and their challengers [15, 16]. Thus, to isolate the effect of issue linkages on C-LA votes, our model controls for House member attributes, such as partisan affiliation, vote share in the previous election, spending by them and their challengers in the previous election, as well as district demographics that may independently affect how legislators vote.
Our analysis of votes on C-LAs suggests that while only climate LAs are negatively associated with House votes, linking C-LAs with other environmental issues changes the legislative dynamics. All else equal, C-LAs associated with clean air or environmental justice are more likely to garner support, while C-LAs linked with water or transportation are associated with diminished support.
The paper proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we outline the theory behind House vote and issue linkage in the context of U.S. climate politics and propose testable hypotheses. In Section 3, we describe the original dataset, empirical approach, and methodology. In Section 4, we report our findings and finally in Section 5 we conclude by highlighting our contribution to climate politics literature, the limitations of our work, and suggestions for future work both within and outside the U.S. context.
Issue linkage and legislative politics
The literature on legislative voting and electoral accountability identifies several factors that influence House voting. Studies explore if House votes influence re-election, all else equal [16–18]. But this begs a prior question: what district level factors might House members consider in deciding upon roll-call positions [17]. Based on this extensive literature, we examine several individual level and district-level characteristics.
But even in the context of an individual House member and a given district, House members may believe that some LAs focused on specific issues will appeal more to their constituents than others. Because LAs could involve multiple issues, and legislators strategically bundle issues together [19–21], we explore the role of issue linkages in influencing pro-climate votes.
Issue linkage, a well-established concept in negotiating theory, implies that adding and subtracting related issues can change leverage in negotiations [22]. Linking a core issue with another issue could help build support, but also poison the negotiations [23]. The intuition is that specific interests promote or impede a specific issue. If this issue is linked with some other subject, arguably a more powerful interest coalition could be constructed. Or, in other cases, linking a core issue with another issue could mobilize interests that are antagonistic to the linked issue. In the U.S., the strategy of linking issues has been blamed for LAs that begin as climate policy, but end up accommodating key politicians with the addition of complex provisions that alienate environmentalist voters [24].
Scholars note the role of issue linkage in climate change politics in the context of public opinion. For example, they find that support for climate policies rises if climate issues are linked to public health [25] or local pollution issues [26]. There is a well-developed literature on public support for various types of carbon taxes, and how this varies when tax revenue is put to different uses [27, 28]. Other scholars find that public support for climate policy increases if it is linked to national security [29].
At the international level, Putnam’s [30] two-level game logic rested on linking domestic politics with international negotiations. There is also a well-established literature on how issue linkages have helped foster environmental agreements [31–34].
While scholars note that issue linkage can influence legislative outcomes, it has not been extensively analyzed at the level of legislative votes in the context of climate change. In this paper, we examine how linking C-LAs with four policy issues with environmental dimensions–air, water, transportation, and environmental justice–are associated with House members’ votes. First, we consider if issue linkages are associated with legislative support for climate policy only, without linkages. We might expect some House members to be more likely to support C-LAs with issue linkages compared to stand-alone C-LAs. Given that the Democratic party is generally considered to be pro-climate, these two considerations may influence each other. We hypothesize:
H1: Climate LAs without issue linkages will be neither supported nor opposed by House members.
H1a: Climate LAs without issue linkages are more likely to receive support from Democrats.
Clean air and clean water are among the most basic human needs. Environmental justice is a growing issue with vocal constituencies, and transportation infrastructure can be closely linked to local economic development. Arguably, linking these issues with climate should change the legislative dynamics behind climate LAs. While climate mitigation creates a global public good, these four issues create local public goods and serve (or hinder) local economic needs. However, these issues vary in important ways as well. Air and water pollution have different levels of problem visibility. Legislators are incentivized to support issues that lead to visible improvements for their constituents. Scholars note that air pollution has relatively high visibility relative to water pollution [35]. As Cao and Prakash [36] note, air pollution produces smoke plumes from smokestacks which can be visible from long distances or vehicular exhausts that citizens experience on a routine basis. In contrast, water pollution is less visible because citizens often do not typically observe water pipes discharging wastewater into waterbodies. It follows that if a pollution issue is more visible to the public, it will draw support from legislators when voting on climate issues. We hypothesize:
- H2: Climate LAs are more likely to receive support when linked to air pollution.
- H3: Climate LAs are less likely to receive support when linked to water policy.
In recent years, the issue of justice has become an important component of discussions across policy areas, including environmental policy [37]. Environmental justice could be viewed as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to…environmental laws” [38].The environmental justice movement probably began in 1982 when the local community protested against a toxic landfill in Warren County, North Carolina [39]. In 1994, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12898 directing federal agencies to consider the impacts of policies on marginalized populations and strategize how to implement environmental justice [40]. More recently, there has been greater attention paid to justice issues at the policy level since income and racial inequalities have occupied a more prominent position in political discourse [41]. Despite these efforts, environmental inequality persists in exposure to industrial toxins, and marginalized communities are at a higher risk of climate-related impacts [3, 41]. Climate disruptions whether by flooding, urban heat islands, wildfires or hurricanes are going to impose disproportionate costs on vulnerable populations who also have fewer resources to adapt to them. Hence, justice is a key pillar of climate policy [42]. We hypothesize:
- H4: Climate LAs are more likely to receive support when linked to environmental justice.
Transportation is a critical component of the US economy and accounts for 28% of its greenhouse gas emissions [43]. While, transportation decarbonization is critical to climate policy, it is opposed by well-organized labor and industry groups in the automobile, trucking and construction industries. Moreover, temperature, precipitation, sea level, wind load, storm surge, and wave heights will have short- and long-term implications on the transportation system in the coming years that climate policy will need to account for [44]. Much of our critical transportation infrastructure is vulnerable to climate change; while the cost of redesigning and retrofitting transportation infrastructure to adapt to climate change would be significant, the cost of ignoring future impacts would be even higher [45].
Given the high dependence of the modern economy on the personal automobile, the public wants a well-maintained road network that can meet their transportation needs. That means that even when transportation infrastructure policy is not linked to climate change, it has the advantage of broad public support for national policy; opinion polls show that a majority of U.S. respondents consistently support government spending on transportation infrastructure [10]. We hypothesize:
- H5: Climate LAs are more likely to receive support when linked to transportation.
Data, methods, and model
LCV has identified 406 environmental LAs for the period 2007–2021; a subset of 77 pertain to climate issues (the full list of House bills, House resolutions, or amendments to a bill or resolution is included in S2 Text). LCV determines a vote to either be pro-climate (where a “yes” vote is in favor of climate change action) or anti-climate (where a “no" vote prevents action harmful to climate change). In our dataset, each legislator is coded to have either voted on the preferred side for climate change or not. That is, if the member abstained, we coded it as “no” because the member did not take an affirmative position on climate issues. Our substantive results do not change even if we exclude the abstentions from the dataset (S1 Text, Model 1).
Very few climate actions pass the House of Representatives, and even fewer are signed into law. This is why the legislator-vote analysis is theoretically interesting; by observing pro-environment votes even in the absence of successful legislative actions, we have a better sense of the climate voting patterns. Thus, our unit of analysis is the individual votes cast by legislators on climate LAs for the period 2007–2021. The full dataset includes 34,634 observations, but we include only 26,843 in the data analysis due to the lack of district-level demographic data for some early years.
We hand-coded the LCV vote data based on the information presented by LCV on a unique page for each vote. The variables include the year the vote took place, legislative session, roll call number, LCV’s assigned vote name, issue areas, legislation name and number, whether the vote was on a bill, resolution, or amendment, the outcome of the vote, and the outcome of the legislation—whether it was passed and signed into law or not.
Given the binary outcomes of legislative votes on C-LAs, we fit a logistic regression with robust standard errors clustered by legislative district (N = 431 due to the incomplete district data referenced above). In addition, we present an OLS model for ease of interpretation. The logistic and OLS models have the same substantive results. The key issue of interest is whether the LAs were about climate only or whether they also pertained to clean air, water, environmental justice, or transportation. Given that the legislative vote is the unit of analysis, we control for House members attributes (partisan affiliation, vote share in the previous election, as well as spending by them and their challengers in the previous election) as well as district-level demographic factors.
We relied on LCV categorization to assess issues that were associated with each LA. An LA could just be categorized as climate change only or have up to 8 additional environmental issues associated with it. These include energy, transportation, wildlife, environmental justice, clean air, water, oceans, and drilling. 34 C-LAs were not y linked to other environmental issues. Of the remaining 43 C-LAs, we focus on linkages with 4 specific issues (air, water, justice, and transportation) which are politically important because of their local implications. At the same time, our model controls for the total number of additional issues (wildlife, drilling, energy, and oceans) associated with each LA (range 1 to 8). We illustrate our coding of issue linkages with concrete examples below.
In the C-LA dataset, the issue category “clean air” includes 9 LAs. Consider the 2018 amendment to the Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2019; the amendment proposed by Representative Mullin (R-OK) would have stopped the EPA from enforcing an Obama administration rule to reduce methane pollution. LCV set “no” as the pro-environment vote on this amendment. The amendment was passed by the Republican House, but the legislation was not taken up by the Senate.
The issue category “water” includes 13 LAs in the climate change dataset. An example is a 2021 amendment to the Investing in a New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation (INVEST) in America Act. Representative Lee (D-NV) sponsored an amendment that would require wastewater infrastructure fund applicants to assess climate change impacts on their project. “Yes” was the pro-environment vote, and the amendment was passed by the House but not included in the final law signed by the President.
The issue category “environmental justice” includes 4 LAs in the climate change dataset. The Moving Forward Act LA from 2020 included environmental justice, water, transportation, and clean energy (that is, 4 issue areas). This was a broad infrastructure package that addressed environmental justice by replacing lead pipes and reducing roadway air pollution in areas that expose minority communities to higher levels of toxic pollution. The LCV pro-environment vote was “yes,” and the LA was approved by the House but not taken up by the Senate.
The issue category “transportation” includes 5 LAs in the climate change dataset. A group of amendments proposed by Representative Lamb (D-PA) for the 2021 INVEST in America Act are categorized as one transportation and wildlife LA by LCV. The 42 amendments include transportation resilience to severe weather and climate change, direct the Departments of Transportation and Energy to integrate electric vehicles into the transportation system, and highway funds to U.S. territories. The pro-environment vote was “yes,” and the amendments passed the House. Some of these amendments were included in the final law passed and signed by the President.
Issue linkages probably have differential appeal across House members for a variety of reasons. Moreover, their House votes could also be influenced by member-specific factors. Thus, in addition to partisan affiliation, our model controls for the party nominee’s vote share in the previous election as a signal to the legislator of how much support their party has in their district. We also include the logged spending by the party nominee and their challenger in the previous election [17, 46].
The political and institutional landscape could also influence C-LA votes. Because Democratic Congressional leaders and Presidents tend to be pro-climate, this might encourage members to vote in favor of C- LAs. Therefore, we control for whether the vote occurred under a Democratic House, a Democratic President, or a Democratic Senate.
Members might assess a C-LA’s political implication depending on whether it seeks to impose costs via new regulations or pertains to spending (which creates new benefits), but also invites backlash from deficit hawks. We control for whether the C-LA pertained to appropriations or regulations based on the C-LA text.
House members may also be influenced by their district’s demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. We use the American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates from each election year to control for race, gender, age, unemployment level, and poverty level. We also control for the number of workers in the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining sectors because C-LAs may receive pushback or support from these industries.
Recent disasters could also make voters more aware of the effects of climate change. Moreover, the effect of these disasters on individuals and communities, including the time to rebuild destroyed structures, could persist for a long period of time, reminding constituents of the costs of not addressing climate change. Thus, we include a rolling sum of the last year’s FEMA disaster declarations; our results do not change if we include 2, 4, or 6 years instead. Finally, recognizing that the political stakes (and the concomitant House vote) might vary across different types of LAs, we also control for whether the LA was tabled as a House bill, House resolution, or amendment to a bill or resolution.
Results
We present descriptive statistics in Table 1 and the results from the regression analysis in Table 2.
A sole focus on climate issues is associated with a negative and statistically significant effect on House members’ vote, instead of the lack of support that we hypothesized (H1 not supported). This is an important though discouraging finding because on their own, climate issues reduce legislative traction. Yet, there are partisan differences. When climate only LAs are interacted with partisan affiliation (Democrat), the effect is positive (H1a supported). Following Brambor et al. [47] we present the predicted probabilities of the interaction effect with only climate issue from Model 2 in Fig 1.
In Table 2 we present the logistic and OLS models that include key issue variables. Model 1 presents the unconditional effects of the linked issues while Model 2 presents the conditional effect when issue area dummies are interacted with partisanship (Democrats). As noted by Brambor et al., we do not indicate the significance of the lower order terms in Table 2, only the interaction terms [47].
In C-LAs that mention other issues, we find that linkages with clean air, environmental justice, and transportation increase legislative support (H2, H4, and 5 are supported), and the linkage with water decreases legislative support (H3 is supported). Taken together, these results emphasize the importance of issue linkage in U.S. legislative politics when it pertains to climate change. For climate supporters, it offers concrete guidelines as to what types of issue linkages are likely to increase or diminish support for C-LAs. The predicted probability for these results given partisan affiliation can be found in Fig 2. Similarly to the result from only climate LAs, Democrats are far more likely to support C-LAs with each linkage compared to Republicans.
In terms of member attributes, the vote share from the previous election, and election spending are not significant. Neither are district demographics and unemployment levels. However, the sectoral composition of the workforce matters: the share of workers outside the manufacturing and service industry (agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining) are associated with a significant but negative effect on climate votes. This provides additional support for the argument that climate policy costs tend to be concentrated on specific sectors [42, 48]. This is where the discussion on “just transition” [49–51] becomes important. While climate policy might benefit the economy in the aggregate and produce the global public good of mitigation, it creates are winners and losers. Instead of dismissing climate opponents as ill-informed or anti-science, arguably the economic concerns of climate policy losers need to be addressed, especially because many of them are well organized with capacities and motivations to derail legislative action.
Partisan control of Congress and the nature of legislative action is associated with climate votes as well. Bills (compared to amendments as the reference category) and a Democratic House are associated with positive and significant effects. Appropriations LAs (with regulatory LAs as the reference category) have a significant but negative association with climate votes. Surprisingly, the number of FEMA disasters in the previous year does not have a significant association with voting; the result holds with FEMA disasters in the past 2–6 years as well. This speaks to the broader issue whether prior experience with extreme weather events influences public perceptions of climate change and therefore legislative votes [52–54].
Conclusion
Our paper contributes to both environmental policy and legislative politics literature to show the important role of issue linkages in both supporting and impeding the climate agenda in the House. While the US Congress has enacted very few climate bills, we document that there has been non-trivial legislative action in the form of House bills, House resolutions, or amendments to a bill or resolution. Therefore, we suggest that in studying US legislative politics of highly partisan issues, scholars should broaden their scope of inquiry to consider different forms of legislative action alongside landmark legislation. The reason is that this approach allows both scholars and policymakers to assess legislators’ policy preferences, their willingness to publicly signal them, and the factors that might be associated with these decisions. Important information about patterns of climate voting can be gleaned even from legislative actions that do not result in a final law; congressional politics leads legislators to signal policy positions even on votes not likely to pass. We use this information to demonstrate the importance of issue linkage and underscore the role of partisanship in climate policy.
This paper has several limitations. We do not claim a causal connection between issue linkages and the legislative vote; our claims are about association only. Second, the scope of this analysis is constrained by the availability of district-level data and LCV methodology. The earliest years of demographics by Congressional district were not readily accessible, therefore those votes were dropped in the regression analysis. We recognize that LCV’s definition of an environmental vote, and which environmental votes are associated with climate change or other issues, could also introduce a degree of bias to the data. LCV could skew towards larger bills that are more likely to capture public attention, or be more likely to consider amendments proposed by high-profile legislators, both of which could make legislators more likely to vote on the pro-environment side compared to lower-profile LAs. There could be additional votes on bills, resolutions, or amendments that others might consider a climate change vote and should be included in the analysis.
For example, consider the case of the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act which “established the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund (GAOA LRF) to address overdue maintenance needs. GAOA also permanently authorized funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) —a separate fund aimed at safeguarding our natural areas and cultural heritage” [55]. While LCV only categorizes this as “Land/Forests” and not as a climate bill, it has important implications for climate policy.
The LCV directory of votes includes complete bills on environmental issues, and amendments on environmental issues, but not sections of LAs or resolutions. Expanding this definition would allow an analysis to consider portions of appropriations bills that fund the EPA, Department of Interior, Department of Energy, and other climate-related government agencies.
Future work on this subject could consider other possible legislative outcomes. Instead of an individual legislator’s pro-environment vote, what leads to climate action passing in the House? Or a step further, what leads to climate legislation being enacted, as opposed to Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency (recall that the Great American Outdoors Act was passed by a Republican Senate and signed into law by Republican President)?
For legislative politics scholars, we suggest examining the role of issue linkages (in both highly partisan and less partisan issues) in the context of Congressional committees; certain combinations of issues could make it more or less likely for the legislation to move from committee to the House floor, a significant filter in the legislative process. Some issues might have a strong lobbying force behind them, which would require an analysis to untangle the issue linkage effect from the corporate influence. Energy, drilling, and agriculture legislation see significant influence from the fossil fuel and farming industries, so an effect on environmental voting may be attributed to lobbying rather than the combined issues.
Finally, the issue of generalizability to other countries. As legislative politics scholars recognize, legislative actions vary across different types of legislative institutions. Moreover, given the substantial polarization in American politics on climate change, legislative action possibly takes a distinct partisan flavor. Thus, the subject of issue linkages becomes crucial in breaking or creating the legislative logjam. Future work should assess the role of issue linkages in motivating pro-climate legislative action in countries with different types of legislative institutions, and where climate change is a less partisan issue.
Supporting information
S2 Text. List of legislative actions included.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000440.s002
(DOCX)
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