Measuring Congressional Partisanship on Energy and the Environment in the Age of Obama: The Cases of Offshore Drilling in Alaska and the Keystone XL Pipeline

摘要

The hypothesis for this article is that partisan voting in the US Congress since the 1980s prompts the need to confirm it empirically as a baseline for exploring other variables that may influence public policy decisions. It is worthwhile to measure that partisanship in two key energy-environmental policies during the Obama Presidency. First, how did partisan voting affect the decision by Shell to cease offshore exploratory drilling in the Arctic in 2015? Moreover, was partisanship a factor in President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that year? I found the degrees of congressional partisanship to be very high on key votes in both cases, but relatively lower in the Keystone case. The inference is that legislative party politics can offer a partial explanation for policy continuity or change. These findings set the stage for further inquiry on other explanatory variables both within and external to the political system.