How Radical Environmental Sabotage Impacts US Elections

In this paper we examine the impact of forceful or violent environmental sabotage (FVES) on U.S. elections. We argue that voters see ideological similarities between groups that engage in FVES and other nonviolent environmental organizations, like the Green Party. This means that when an environment...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Farrer, Benjamin (Author) ; Klein, Graig R. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2022
In: Terrorism and political violence
Year: 2022, Volume: 34, Issue: 2, Pages: 218-239
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Keywords:
Voting
Political Violence
Terror
Green Party
Election
ecoterror
Environmentalism
Eco-sabotage
Description
Summary:In this paper we examine the impact of forceful or violent environmental sabotage (FVES) on U.S. elections. We argue that voters see ideological similarities between groups that engage in FVES and other nonviolent environmental organizations, like the Green Party. This means that when an environmentalist organization engages in FVES, it has a negative impact on voter attitudes toward all environmental organizations. Moreover, this negative impact will be stronger if environmentalists had previously made electoral progress, and so they cannot use the excuse that democratic methods had failed and they were forced to turn to FVES. We demonstrate this by showing that when FVES occurs, Green Party candidates tend to win a lower share of the vote in the next election. However, this effect is conditional on the prior electoral history of the Green Party. If the Green Party has a poor electoral record, then sabotage has little effect, but if the Green Party has a better electoral record, then voters are less forgiving of sabotage. We find no evidence that FVES effects Republican or Democratic vote shares. We conclude that different organizations within the same social movement are connected in ways that impact electoral outcomes.
ISSN:1556-1836
DOI:10.1080/09546553.2019.1678468