Parties, Politics, and Regulation: Evidence From Clean Air Act Enforcement

Abstract

Does local Federal regulation respond to the preferences of local Congressional representatives? For example, do Republican Congressmen reduce local enforcement of Clean Air laws in their districts? We use facility-level panel data on Clean Air Act inspections over 1989-2005 to study the causal effect of a Congressman's party affiliation on local enforcement. Random assignment of electoral outcomes is obtained with a Regression Discontinuity design. We find that new Republican (vs. Democratic) Representatives significantly depress inspection rates for local polluting facilities in the first year after their election. (JEL D73, Q52, Q53)

Polluting politics

“…Better monitoring is in line with Innes and Mitra (2015) who find that inspection rates in the first year after the election is lower under a Republican governor. In this paper, we use aggregate data across multiple monitoring stations.…”

“…Fredriksson and Wollscheid (2010) find that party discipline, strength, and political instability are strong determinants of policy outcomes, while List and Sturm (2006) argues that policies are largely influenced by lobbying and finds a strong link between electoral incentives and environmental policies. Innes and Mitra (2015) find that new Republican representatives significantly depress inspection rates in the year following their election.…”

The Political Economy of Environmental Consequences: A Review of the Empirical Literature

“…Besides environmental performance indicators, previous studies have also linked environmental enforcement decisions to politicians' partisan ideologies. Based on the EPA enforcement data of the Clean Air Act, Innes and Mitra (2015) document that local enforcement measured by facility inspections are responsive to the party affiliation of the local Congressional representative (Democrat vs. Republican). Exploiting random variations of election results which arguably occur in districts with a tight election competition, a regression discontinuity analysis shows that relative to Democratic counterparts, the election of Republican representatives has an immediate negative effect on inspection intensities in polluting facilities in their own constituency.…”

Independence despite Political Appointment ? The Curious Case of the Austrian Ombudsman Board

“…Similar to regulatory agencies (Kagan 1994), ombuds institutions also operate in a political environment, and they are involved in social struggles which are oft en political. In the regulation literature, scholars have explored the association between the party affi liation of political principals and the enforcement activities of regulators (Moe 1985;Almond and Esbester 2018) or the causal pathways of political infl uence (Innes and Mitra 2015).…”