This study evaluates the roles of ideology, constituency, and political party for roll-call voting in the U.S. Senate on a broad set of environmental issues. The study estimates a model of political support using voting scores from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) for the period 1988-1998, including observations on 91 senators for 130 roll-call votes. The study decomposes the scale-adjusted scores into relative weights due to the general electorate, the senator's support constituency, party leadership, and ideology. The main findings are that a senator's ideology is by far the most important consideration for voting profiles on environmental issues, and that party affiliation and regional loyalty explain about 74% of measured ideology. Hence, “green” voting tends to be highly partisan.

PREVIOUS studies of residential and commercial energy use, exclusive of electricity, have generally found that price is not a significant determinant of demand.' This paper analyzes the demand for space heating energy using cross-sectional data by state for 1971. We find that price is a significant determinant of demand with an elasticity of approximately -0.3. In deriving this estimate, explicit attention is given to: (1) discrimination among alternative functional forms since average price data rather than marginal prices are used; and (2) specification of relationships that attempt to capture the trade-off that exists between energy inputs and housing construction and insulation materials.

Jon P. Nelson, George R. Neumann, Ronald M. Crandall, A Comparison of Alternative Econometric Models of Iron and Steel Investment Behavior, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Feb., 1980), pp. 122-127