By Allie Goldstein

The 112th Congress matches the 111th as including the largest number of Hispanic representatives in U.S. history with 31 members: two in the Senate and 29 in the House. According to recent research published by SNRE doctoral student Kerry Ard and Professor Paul Mohai, this diversification may bode very well for pro-environmental policy-making.

The study, "Hispanics and Environmental Voting in the U.S. Congress," published in the December journal Environmental Practice, examined the records of Hispanic members of the House from 1995 to 2006 using multivariate-regression models. Their work found that Hispanics were significantly more likely to cast pro-environment votes than their white colleagues, though slightly less í¢â‚¬Å“green than African American members of Congress. Their study was the first study to look at Hispanic congressional members' voting behavior—an important gap to fill given that Hispanics recently became the largest minority in the United States.

"The way I translate this is, if you want a more pro-environmental Congress, elect more Hispanic and African American members,"  Mohai said.

The study's results are also significant given the arbitrary but widespread belief that people of color are not as concerned about the environment as white Americans. This conventional wisdom has been so strong that for a long time no one bothered to look at the data, Mohai said. A leading scholar in the field of Environmental Justice, Mohai has made a career out of statistically documenting how the unequal exposure to environmental hazards, such as polluting industry, is often drawn along racial lines.

"I have wondered for some time if it's actually been intentional to perpetuate that conventional wisdom to persuade people of color to accept environmental conditions in their communities,"  he said. His research has shown that minority neighborhoods are those most often subjected to the unjust choice between exposure to environmental toxins and jobs. He suspected that Congress members representing minority constituents living in polluted environments would be more, not less, likely to vote pro-environmentally.

When they looked at the data, Ard and Mohai found just that. Environmental voting scores assigned by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) fluctuated around 80 percent for African-American members of Congress; 60 to 70 percent for Hispanics; and 40 percent for whites. The LCV score is based on votes concerning air and water pollution, hazardous waste, national parks and forests and climate change legislation, among other topics. The pro-environment voting behavior broken down by race seemed to mirror public opinion polls, including one by ABC News that found about  59 percent of Hispanics polled said they thought the government should be doing í¢â‚¬Å“much moreí¢â‚¬  about global warming, compared with 66 percent of African Americans and 42 percent of whites.

"All the surveys that I'e seen and all the surveys that I've done myself have shown that people of color are much more concerned about the environment than the conventional wisdom indicates," Mohai said. "They're following through on those concerns by making the votes and taking the actions that support a pro-environmental agenda."

As Ard and Mohai note, a pro-environmental voting record is most highly correlated with party affiliation. Out of the 31 Hispanic members currently in Congress, 21 are Democrats. The study showed a trend of increased partisanship between 1995 and 2006, with Democrats' LCV scores increasing or staying high while Republicans' pro-environment voting fell below 20 percent.

"In this paper, we show that white Democrats have increased their pro-environmental voting to reach the high levels for environmental issues that black Democrats have,"  Ard said. "Republicans, on the other hand, have gone starkly the other direction."

Mohai recalls a time when the environment was not such a divisive issue. It was President Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency through an executive order and signed the Clean Air Act into law in 1970.

"I don't think Democrats and Republicans in the electorate are as polarized as elected officials,"  Mohai said. "I certainly would welcome seeing more pro-environmental Republicans."

The study also found that, next to party membership, money given to representatives from oil and gas lobbyists is the second strongest predictor of environmental voting records. Ard is following up on this connection between PAC donations and environmental policy-making in her current dissertation research.

"These findings provide support for the concerns expressed by the Occupy Wall Street movement that money is playing an increasingly important role in deciding our social policy," she said. As the first author of the study, Ard earned her master's degree from SNRE in 2006 and is now continuing her research as a doctoral student.