David M. Konisky

Values, Conflict, and Trust in Participatory Environmental Planning

The need for greater public involvement in environmental decisionmaking has been highlighted in recent high-profile research reports and emphasized by leaders at all levels of government. In some cases, environmental agencies have opened the door to greater participation in their programs. However, there is relatively little information on what can be gained from greater public involvement and what makes some programs work while others fail. This article presents an evaluation of public participation in several cases of environmental planning in the Great Lakes region, focusing on how effectively these efforts introduced public values into government decisionmaking, resolved conflict among stakeholders, and built trust in environmental agencies. Data for the analysis came from a “case survey” method in which the authors systematically coded information from previously written case studies. The research findings support an optimistic view of public participation-although not without important caveats-and emphasize the importance of communication and commitment in the participatory process.

What are we Gaining from Stakeholder Involvement? Observations from Environmental Planning in the Great Lakes

Attention to the need for greater stakeholder involvement in environmental decisionmaking has been increasing in recent years. The authors draw on a number of cases of environmental planning in the Great Lakes Region in an attempt to understand the possible benefits stakeholder processes can bring to environmental decisionmaking. They outline benefits in four areas: (1) the quality of decisions, (2) the relationships among important players in the decisionmaking process, (3) the capacity for managing environmental problems, and (4) improvements in environmental quality. Although the research suggests that in a number of the cases studied there was a good outcome in the first three areas, there did not appear to be an obvious link between good participation and improvements in environmental quality through implementation of cleanup and restoration activities.

Exporting Air Pollution? Regulatory Enforcement and Environmental Free Riding in the United States

Political jurisdictions have incentives to promote pollution spillovers to capture the benefits of economic production within their borders while exporting the environmental costs to their neighbors. The authors examine the extent to which U.S. states engage in this type of free-riding behavior. Studying enforcement of the federal Clean Air Act from 1990 through 2000, the authors employ zero-inflated negative binomial regression to predict the number of state-initiated enforcement actions conducted in counties bordering other jurisdictions. They find that states perform fewer enforcement actions in counties adjacent to international borders but no evidence that states conduct less enforcement in counties that border other states.

Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change Concern

This paper examines whether experience of extreme weather events—such as excessive heat, droughts, flooding, and hurricanes—increases an individual’s level concern about climate change. We bring together micro-level geospatial data on extreme weather events from NOAA’s Storm Events Database with public opinion data from multiple years of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to study this question. We find evidence of a modest, but discernible positive relationship between experiencing extreme weather activity and expressions of concern about climate change. However, the effect only materializes for recent extreme weather activity; activity that occurred over longer periods of time does not affect public opinion. These results are generally robust to various measurement strategies and model specifications. Our findings contribute to the public opinion literature on the importance of local environmental conditions on attitude formation.

Compliance Bias and Environmental (In)Justice

Scholarship on race- and class-based disparities in regulatory outcomes has failed to provide a theoretically grounded account of this bias’ origin. We address this shortcoming by providing a microlevel explanation of how demographics influence compliance bias or the failure to detect noncompliant firms. We argue that regulatory compliance is best understood as a dual-agent—firm and regulatory officer—production function, and that community mobilization and agency decision-making authority shape bureaucrats’ incentives to report noncompliance. We test our argument with an original dataset on community mobilization and agency structure that delineates the political costs and benefits of state regulatory officers implementing the U.S. Clean Air Act. Using detection-controlled estimation, we find that while certain communities are vulnerable to compliance bias, such bias is mitigated in the presence of either politically mobilized communities or decentralized enforcement authority within the implementing agency.

Adopting Local Environmental Institutions: Environmental Need and Economic Constraints

Communities are increasingly turning to local environmental institutions (LEIs) to address unmet environmental challenges. Yet there has been very little empirical analysis of LEIs, and we know surprisingly little about their origins. In this article, the authors use a rational choice framework to examine the incentives and disincentives communities face in deciding whether to establish LEIs. In particular, the authors study the decision of communities to adopt local wetlands bylaws under the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act. Using event history analysis, the authors find strong evidence that environmental need, economic attributes, and economic constraints have strong effects on the impulse of communities to adopt LEIs.

Assessing U.S. State Susceptibility to Environmental Regulatory Competition

In this article, I examine the environmental race-to-the-bottom argument by studying whether state susceptibility to interstate economic competition helps explain which U.S. states engage in environmental regulatory competition. Specifically, I create a susceptibility index using four state economic attributes: overall growth, unemployment, manufacturing growth, and manufacturing employment. Studying state enforcement of federal environmental programs, I find little evidence that states, which are theoretically more susceptible to interstate economic competition are more likely to respond strategically to the regulatory behavior of economic competitor states. These results cast doubt on the idea that the environmental regulatory competition predicted by race-to-the-bottom theory is mediated by intrastate economic conditions.

Environmental Free Riding in State Water Pollution Enforcement

Interjurisdictional pollution spillovers are a critical issue in U.S. environmental policy. When policy responsibility is decentralized, state governmental agencies have incentives to promote these externalities in order to capture the benefits of economic activity within their borders while compelling neighbors to shoulder the resultant environmental costs. To test this free riding hypothesis, prior studies have relied on crude proxies to delineate a regulated entity’s proximity to a neighboring state. In this article, we develop a more refined set of measures using newly available data on facility location to isolate the conditions under which free riding is theoretically more likely to occur. We then assess state enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act directed at major water polluters under these conditions to determine the extent to which U.S. states engage in environmental free riding behavior. Our empirical results are mixed, but in general they fail to support theoretical expectations generated by the free rider argument.

Penalizing the Party: Health Care Reform Issue Voting in the 2010 Election

Many political pundits characterized the 2010 election as a referendum on President Obama’s health care reform law. The political science literature on issue voting, however, does not consistently demonstrate that these types of policy evaluations are central to citizens’ vote choices. Moreover, existing theories suggest different predictions about how the health care reform issue would affect elections across different levels of government. Studying data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), the analysis indicates that those opposed to health care reform were less likely to vote for Democratic candidates in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, state gubernatorial, and state attorneys general contests, controlling for partisan affiliation, political ideology, perceptions of the economy, and evaluations of other salient policy issues. These findings suggest that, across the board, Democrats were penalized for their support of health care reform, and more generally provide evidence of the role of noneconomic issue voting in U.S. elections.

Bureaucratic and Public Attitudes toward Environmental Regulation and the Economy

This article analyzes bureaucratic and public attitudes on the relationship between environmental regulation and the economy. Specifically, the analysis compares responses to the State Environmental Managers Survey – a 2005 survey of senior-level officials working in state environmental agencies, and the 2005 MIT Public Opinion Research Training Lab Survey – a nationally-representative public opinion poll. The responses to these surveys suggest that the bureaucrats and the public share basic attitudes about the appropriate level of environmental regulation on business, but that they differ in their understandings of the role of environmental regulation in industry investment decisions.