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How do we understand political polarization around the issue of climate change in the United States? Using a mixed-methods approach, this paper unpacks the components of the debate over climate science and policy between 2015 and 2017 to understand the sources of divisiveness that have come to characterize climate politics in the United States. Data in our analysis include the content of Congressional hearings and open-ended, semi-structured interviews with the most influential climate policy actors at the federal level. We find high levels of polarization around two specific components of this debate: the type of policy instrument and the role of the federal government in regulating carbon dioxide emissions. This paper concludes by exploring how patterns of polarization preceding the 2016 election help us to understand the expected political debate over federal climate policy in the years to come.

This paper presents the theory of the global environmental system to explain the different climate change regimes emerging from advanced industrialized nations. Using data collected regarding the formation of domestic climate change regimes in the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands, the specifics of the theory are outlined. I begin by analyzing the expectations of some of the more prominent sociological theories about the society‐environment relationship in the advanced world finding that they do not explain the disparate responses to the regulation of greenhouse gases in these countries. The theory of the global environmental system is proposed as an alternative to the rather extreme expectations of the sociological literature on society/environment relationships. Through this proposed theory, we can better understand successful cases of global climate change regimes within the context of the interrelations among domestic and international actors.

How do large-scale protest events differ across nation-states? Do social networks play different roles in different places and, if so, how do they matter? This paper compares the role that social networks play in mobilizing participants in large-scale domestic protest. Employing a paired comparison of large-scale domestic protests in the United States and France, I find that social ties play a differing role in each country. Although personal and organizational ties played almost equal roles in mobilizing participants at the protest-event in the United States, organizational ties played a much more significant role in mobilizing participants to protest in France. In addition, participants in these two events reported having very different levels of civic engagement at these two protests. I conclude by discussing how these differences are related to the characteristics of the mobilizations themselves.

Kathleen M. Blee is distinguished professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is completing a book manuscript on emerging social movement groups in Pittsburgh. She has also written extensively on women in U.S. racist movements, including Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, published in 1991 by the University of California Press and Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement, published in 2002 by the University of California Press. Earlier, she studied the historical origins of regional poverty and co-authored The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia with Dwight Billings, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press.