Neal D. Woods

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.

Legislative Professionalism and Influence on State Agencies: The Effects of Resources and Careerism

Legislative professionalization typically involves two concomitant processes: increasing institutional resources and increasing careerism among state legislators. These processes, we argue, entail different effects for legislative influence on state administrative agencies. Greater legislative resources serve to increase legislative influence, but greater political careerism among state legislators serves to decrease it. Because these two processes are normally intertwined within the process of legislative professionalization, the net effect of professionalism is uncertain, although our analysis suggests that the negative effect of careerism may outweigh the positive effect of institutional resources. These results have significant implications for the democratic responsiveness of executive branch agencies.

Interest Group Influence on State Administrative Rule Making The Impact of Rule Review

In many states, administrative rules are subject to review by elected political officials in the legislative and/or executive branches. Using recently developed measures of state rule review powers, this study investigates whether they serve to enhance or diminish interest group influence on the content of agency regulations. It finds that both greater gubernatorial and legislative rule review authority significantly decrease the amount of interest group influence reported by state agency directors. These results provide evidence that powers of external rule review may serve to counteract the effects of subsystem policy making.

Strength in Numbers: Why States Join Interstate Compacts

Interstate compacts hold tremendous promise for resolving tough public problems at the subnational level. They have also been promoted as one way that states can protect their sovereignty vis-à-vis the national government. But the rate at which states participate in such compacts varies widely. Thus, we ask: What explains a states propensity to join national interstate compacts? Using time-series cross-sectional event count models of state compact participation from 1960–2000, we find that states join compacts to enhance their policymaking capacity and to substitute for policy action by the national government. We also find that the physical connection among states influences their preference for certain types of compacts. Isolated states show a preference for compacts that simply harmonize policies, while more proximate states are more likely to join compacts that effectively open their borders to other states. Contrary to the expectations of some observers, interstate compacts do not appear to be used strategically by states as a means to forestall federal preemption.

Blurring Borders: The Effect of Federal Activism on Interstate Cooperation

Interstate compacts are an increasingly important policy tool available to states, one that allows them to tackle regional and national issues. What effect does policy activity at the federal level have on state participation in interstate compacts? Drawing on theories of functional federalism, the authors explore the possibility that a state’s response to federal activism varies across policy domains. For economic policy the authors hypothesize that federal activism causes an increase in compact participation, as states attempt to defend themselves against federal intrusion. In other policy areas the authors expect that states are more likely to enter into compacts during periods of relative federal inactivity. Results from a set of event-count models generally support these hypotheses. The study findings suggest that states may sometimes use interstate compacts as a mechanism to resist federal incursion but that this is just one facet of a more complex pattern of intergovernmental policy adjustment.

Policy Diffusion and the Pro-innovation Bias:

Existing research on policy diffusion focuses almost exclusively on “successes” where many jurisdictions adopted the policy or policies under examination. Some have speculated that this “pro-innovation bias” compromises scholars’ ability to draw valid inferences about the factors that influence the diffusion process. We argue that the study of interstate compacts in the United States provides an analytic opportunity to assess whether these concerns are warranted because it allows us to examine an entire universe of cases with unusually wide variability in their adoption patterns. Based on a pooled event history analysis of the interstate compacts that are open to all fifty states, we conclude that the tendency to limit diffusion research to widely adopted policies affects the results of previous studies. Specifically, it appears to lead scholars to systematically overestimate the impact of geographic diffusion pressures and policy attributes, and to underestimate the importance of professional associations and the opportunity to learn from previous adoptions. In sum, the longstanding concerns about a pro-innovation bias in diffusion research seem to be warranted.

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.

Governors Turn Pro: Separation of Powers and the Institutionalization of the American Governorship

This study examines the institutional development of governors’ offices. Pooled analyses from 1983 to 2004 indicate that government growth and workload foster institutionalization, as does rivalry with the legislature. Bargaining relationships with external actors appear to have more limited impact. The authors also find that the dispersion of authority within the executive branch plays a significant role in explaining the development of institutionalized staff structures. Overall, the results indicate that separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches affects gubernatorial institutionalization but that researchers should also consider the intercurrencies that exist within the executive branch.

Separation of Powers and the Politics of Administrative Rule Review

In many states, agency rules are subject to review and possible veto by elected political officials in the legislative and/or executive branches. The consequences of this rule review authority are little understood. Using time-series cross-section data on state environmental compliance costs, this study investigates the impact that several types of administrative rule review procedures have on the stringency of state environmental regulation. The findings suggest that (1) both gubernatorial and legislative rule review powers are systematically associated with reduced environmental compliance costs, (2) legislatures controlled by the Democratic Party use rule review powers to reduce these costs less than Republican ones, and (3) the latter effect is observable only when legislatures have the power to amend or veto rules without the approval of the governor. These results indicate that rule review plays an important, but complex, role in shaping regulatory outcomes.

Gone with the Wind: Federalism and the Strategic Placement of Air Polluters

In federal systems both state governments and firms have incentives to strategically locate polluting facilities where the environmental and health consequences will be borne as much as possible by residents of other jurisdictions. We analyze air polluter location in the United States using a spatial point pattern model, which models where events occur in latitude and longitude. Our analyses indicate that major air polluters are significantly more likely to be located near a state’s downwind border than a control group of other industrial facilities, results that are robust to a wide variety of model specifications and measurement strategies. This effect is particularly pronounced for facilities with toxic air emissions. The observed pattern of polluter location varies systematically across states and time in ways that suggest it is responsive to public policy at both the national and state levels.