The Limited Effects of Federal Environmental Justice Policy on State Enforcement

The federal government adopted several measures during the mid-1990s to address concerns about race-based and class-based disparities in environmental protection. This article examines whether these measures affected the pattern of state enforcement of three federal pollution control laws. Using differences-in-differences models to estimate the effects of the federal policy adoption, I find evidence of increases in state enforcement of the Clean Air Act in large African-American communities, but declines in enforcement in communities with large poor and Hispanic populations. Similarly, there is evidence that state enforcement of the Clean Water Act decreased in poor and African-American communities, but there were no real changes in enforcement of facilities regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Collectively, the analysis suggests that the federal policy had minimal positive effects on state regulatory enforcement.     

Multilevel Instruments for Infrastructure Investment: Evaluating State Revolving Funds for Water

In recent decades, the federal government has introduced complex, multilevel state‐operated revolving loan fund programs as an instrument for promoting state and local investment in national infrastructure priorities while limiting direct federal involvement in implementation. A federally funded state revolving fund (SRF) program combines features of a categorical matching grant to states and a subsidized loan program to localities, both of which should lower the effective price of infrastructure investment and therefore promote higher levels of infrastructure investment. However, little evidence exists to date on whether these programs stimulate new subnational spending or instead displace spending that would have occurred otherwise. We evaluate the stimulus effects of SRFs by examining the two largest such programs, the Clean Water and the Drinking Water SRF Programs. Analyzing 17 years of state‐level panel data, we find evidence that the flow of federal funds to states under the SRF programs stimulates new local investment in wastewater infrastructure, but not in drinking water infrastructure. In discussing several possible explanations for these divergent results, we argue for further research that emphasizes the intergovernmental features of this financing tool.     

Explaining State Budget Punctuations: Policy Transparency,Political Institutions,and Electoral Incentives

What factors cause policies experiencing long periods of stability to be interrupted occationally by a short period of large changes? This study argues that electoral incentives might influence the search, supply, and processing of information on constituency issues, as well as the associated cognitive or institutional frictions, and thus determine the presence and variation of punctuated policies. This article develops and evaluates this claim within a systemic framework consisting of policy transparency, political institutions, and electoral incentives. For the purpose of identifying policy punctuations, this research uses the Generalized Pareto Distribution in the Extreme Value Theory. This study analyzes budget spending data collected from FY 1988 to FY 2008 for all 50 American states. This study finds that greater policy transparency is associated with larger spending stability. By contrast, greater gubernatorial competition is more likely to produce extreme spending changes. Electoral incentives shaped by public preference and political term limits have a profound impact on nonincremental policy changes. The impact of policy transparency is conditional on public preference, while that of electoral competition and legislative professionalism is moderated by political term limits. Particularly, a transparent policy consistent with public preference and legislative professionalism with term limits are more likely to give rise to punctuated policies, while gubernatorial (legislative) competition leads to less punctuated changes when governors (legislators) are subject to term limits.     

Latinos and Environmental Justice: Examining the Link between Degenerative Policy,Political Representation,and Environmental Policy Implementation

The theory of social construction and policy design is insightful for exploring the circumstances in which the allocation of policy benefits and burdens is attributed to the feed‐forward effect of degenerative policy that institutionalizes bias and reinforces the prevailing categorization and embedded social meaning regarding target populations. However, this theoretical framework has not been broadly adopted to analyze the environment‐related phenomena. With a nationwide, block‐group‐level sample, this study examines the extent to which degenerative policies pertaining to immigrants influence state agencies' environmental regulatory outputs for predominantly Latino communities. Results show that in the states with moderately to most restrictive immigrant policy and high levels of Latino representation in legislatures, the rigorousness of government agencies' compliance monitoring activities decreases for Latino neighborhoods of environmental justice concern, as states' policy stance toward immigrants becomes more unfavorable. More Latino elected officials do not bolster policy implementation efforts for the vulnerable communities or offset the backlash effect of immigrant policy.     

State Expenditures and Policy Outcomes in Environmental Program Management

Comparative state environmental research seeks to explain the factors contributing to intergovernmental environmental management. In pursuing the answer to this query, researchers have relied on either fiscal (expenditures) or nonfiscal (ranking) measures of state environmental effort. Respecting the debate surrounding state policy outputs and fiscal versus nonfiscal measures, we evaluate comprehensive state environmental management comparing spending and ranking measures in our analysis. Though pronounced differences do exist between the two models, we find pollution and state size to be the primary factors affecting a state's environmental effort no matter which measure is used.     

Bureaucratic Leverage over Policy Choice: Explaining the Dynamics of State-Level Reforms in Telecommunications Regulation

While state governments have enjoyed greater control over regulating local telephone service providers since 1984, movement toward efficiency-based policy reform (e.g., adoption of competitive markets) has proceeded slowly. We investigate this pattern by addressing how the degree of policy discretion held by state public utility commissions (PUCs) affects reform of local telephone exchange regulation. Using precise measures of both PUC discretion and state policy changes over time, we find that states with "stronger" PUCs (more policymaking authority) are significantly more likely to move toward efficiency-based policy regimes and away from traditional rate-of-return regimes. Greater PUC discretion systematically related to state adoption of efficiency-based reforms over time suggests that regulators are using updated information about policy impacts to inform their policymaking activities. Our findings contradict a common presumption that regulatory bureaucracies are simply motivated by a desire to increase their control over policymaking. Instead, state PUCs are a key source of telecommunications policy reform in the states.     

The Rising Agenda of Physician-Assisted Suicide: Explaining the Growth and Content of Morality Policy

Employing theories and methods of agenda-setting analysis, this article explains the rapid rise of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) on the national political agenda based on its status as a morality policy. PAS reached the mass agenda before the professional agenda, probably because PAS is an outgrowth of previous right-to-die policies and Dr. Jack Kevorkian's assisted suicides provided major focusing events. As in other morality policies, competing groups fight for the last word, but PAS has been blocked on most governmental agendas because its image and media tone has been mostly negative and public opinion is divided. Groups in a few generally liberal states have tried to enact policy through referenda when legislators failed to address the issue. We speculate that competing interest groups will become more active and that state courts will become a venue of choice in the future.     

Influencing Environmental Policy in Rural Communities: The Environmental Opposition at Work

Environmental opposition groups have often formed in rural communities as a response to sweeping environmental regulations. They do not match the stereotypes of nongovernmental organizations funded by extractive resource industries, but have a solid grass-roots membership that is stalling, if not altogether thwarting, the momentum of the environmental movement.     

Elections,Policy and the Media: Tasmania's Forests and the 2004 Federal Election

Much of the academic literature holds the media responsible for the proliferation of the game frame as a way of reporting on elections. This paper challenges that view through an examination of media coverage of forest policy in the 2004 federal election. The study of articles published in three major broadsheets finds that the majority of stories were set within the game frame, which depicts elections as sporting contests, and that far fewer articles focused on the issue. The lack of interest in policy is characteristic of election reporting but, in this case, can be attributed to the way in which the major parties managed their campaigns. Not only did they drive the game frame but, as policy makers, they also determined the frame within which the limited media consideration of policy substance was set. The article concludes that political actors must take at least some responsibility for the domination of the game frame in election reporting.     

U.S. Environmental Policy Implementation on Tribal Lands: Trust,Neglect, and Justice

This study investigates the implementation of U.S. environmental protection laws under American Indian tribal governance. The landmark laws of the 1970s that form the core of America's environmental policy regime made no mention of American Indian tribal lands, and the subsequent research literature on environmental policy has given them little attention. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has primary implementation responsibility for environmental protection laws on tribal lands, which offers a unique opportunity to study direct federal implementation apart from typical joint state–federal implementation. Further, because Indian reservations are homes to a disproportionately poor, historically subjugated racial group, analysis of environmental programs on tribal lands offers a unique perspective on environmental justice. We analyze enforcement of and compliance with the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to compare the implementation of environmental policy on tribal lands with nontribal facilities. Analysis reveals that, compared with nontribal facilities, tribal facilities experience less rigorous CWA and SDWA enforcement and are more likely to violate these laws.     

The Implementation of Public Policy: Still the Missing Link

Although theories of public policy and theories of governance both seek to establish relationships between policymaking and its consequences, they do not complement each other very well. Public policy models tend to de-emphasize that which governance theories tend to emphasize: the influence on government performance of implementation, broadly described as the actions taken by those engaged in administration (including managers at all levels, those engaged in service delivery, and third-party agents) after a policy has been lawfully promulgated by elected officials and interpreted by the courts. A comparison of a recently developed theory of public sector performance with several prominent theories of policymaking suggests that multilevel governance theories can supply what continues to be the missing link in public policy theories. At the same time, governance theories might be enriched by the process modeling of public policy theories.     

美国西部开发与联邦政府的土地政策

西部国有土地私有化是美国西部开发的基础和前提,也是美国联邦政府导引和规范西部开发的主要手段。私有化的主要途径是出售和赠予,在此过程中所出现的土地投机现象和宅地法等在当时和后来均备受争议。有必要将这些现象结合起来进行系统的考察。     

Political Decoupling: Private Implementation of Public Policy

Where policy goals can be achieved through regulation of private firms, private provision of public services allows governments to separate public policies from their political costs by shifting those costs to the private sector. Over the past three decades, financial decoupling has emerged as a regulatory strategy for promoting conservation, especially in the energy sector. Decoupling refers to the separation of a firm’s revenues from the volume of its product consumed, which allows companies to pursue resource efficiency free from financial risk. Similarly, when private firms provide public services, they separate public policies from their political costs. This political decoupling allows governments to pursue controversial policies while avoiding their attendant political risks. Applied to environmental policy, this theory implies that potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and succeed when implemented through private firms. As an initial test of the theory, we analyze California water utilities and their responses to that state’s drought from 2015–2017. Analysis shows that, compared with those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water.     

Federal Influence and Urban Policy Entrepreneurship in the Local Prosecution of Economic Crime

In the early 1970's a score of local prosecutors around the United States instituted programs to address the problem of white collar crime and consumer fraud. This article analyzes this process of innovation as a form of policy entrepreneurship. The article concludes with consideration of key questions addressing the sources, character, and consequences of local policy entrepreneurship and the character of federal influence.     

The Reorganization of Russia's Environmental Bureaucracy: Regional Response to Federal Changes

In documenting the merging of the State Committee for the Protection of the Natural Environment (Goskomekologiya) into the Ministry for Natural Resources (Minresursov), Peterson and Bielke (2001) made several predictions as to the merger's impact on environmental protection within the Russian Federation. Utilizing research undertaken approximately two years after the merger, this paper examines the reaction and response to these federal changes from a variety of actors at the regional level, using Samara Oblast as a case study. In so doing, it highlights the potential disparity and distance between decisions made at the federal level and their implementation locally. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O13, Q20. 1 figure, 26 references.     

Evaluating the Environmental Effects of Agricultural Policy

The fact that agricultural policy decisions can have important environmental consequences has become common knowledge among policy scholars and policy practitioners. This relationship is reflected in the increasingly prominent soil conservation and environmental protection components of the 1985 and 1990 Farm Bills. In debating the value of continuing these provisions in the upcoming reauthorization of this legislation, scholars and politicians alike focus almost exclusively on their water quality benefits. However, the soil conservation components of agricultural policy also may affect air quality significantly. Using multivariate transfer function analysis, we find that implementation of the 1985 Farm Bill's Conservation Reserve Program has improved air quality significantly in that area of the country most plagued by agricultural air pollution.     

Explaining Institutional Effectiveness in Australian Environmental Management: An Application of the Haas,Keohane and Levy Model

In their Institutions for the Earth (1993), Haas, Keohane and Levy argue that, at the international level, three fundamental conditions must be met for the effective management of environmental problems. They summarise these conditions as the three 'Cs'-the building of concern; the existence of a suitable contractual environment; and the growth of state capacity. We applied the Haas, Keohane and Levy (HKL) model to three case studies at the national level, in order to ascertain the extent to which the three Cs explained the emergence of successful institutional regimes. We found that two of the three variablesimprovements to the contractual environment and increases in state capacity-had considerable explanatory power. Concern was important in providing the motive force for change, but high levels of concern did not lead to effective institutional regimes unless the other two factors were present. We found a strong reciprocal relationship between state capacity and the contractual environment-the ability to monitor solutions and to generate policy-relevant 'trustable' information, was positively associated with improved negotiating structures and outcomes.