Don't let a serious crisis go to waste: exploring linkages between environmental policy-making and environmental incidents

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the impact of environmental incidents on state-level environmental policy-making in the US. Environmental policy researchers have identified several factors and their impact on states' ability and willingness to formulate green policies. Most studies have used binary values to measure state environmental policy formulation (sepf) variable. However, this strategy can lead to biased estimates because the extent of policy-formulation is not the same across states. We propose an ordinal approach to measure the sepf variable along with multiple correspondence analyses (MCA). We also test for the impact of environmental incidents and its interaction with the strength of environmental organisations on the formulation of green policies. Econometric results from the longitudinal data indicate that the states that witness environmental incidents in the current period are less likely to formulate environmental policies during that period. However, when environmental organisations root their advocacy programmes on previous period's environmental incident(s), it has a positive and significant impact on environmental policy-making. These results contribute not only to our understanding of critical determinants of environmental policy-making, but also indicate that environmental organisations can leverage environmental incidents to influence state-level policy-making.

Keywords:

• state-level environmental policy formulation
• panel data
• environmental incidents

JEL codes:

• Q50
• Q54
• Q58
• Q59

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for comments provided by participants at the Southern Economic Association and the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters. We thank Anna Leonard for excellent research assistance. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. www.emdat.be (accessed 19 May 2013).

2. http://www.c2es.org/us-states-regions (accessed 15 May 2013). We ignored categories that were ‘plans’ and hence were not policies; we also ignore regional issues as we were interested in state-level policy, and we ignore categories that could not be traced back in time. We ignored hazardous waste issues since it is a variable we use on the right-hand side of the regression. Since we are using MCA, the index needs to be constructed using similar variables.

3. The inertia of the second dimension is about 4.5% and the third dimension is 2.2%. Due to the small number, we do not analyze the other dimensions.

4. http://rcfording.wordpress.com/state-ideology-data/ (accessed 1 June 2013).

5 Only 10 states are considered full-time legislatures (meet all year round). Source: http://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/full-and-part-time-legislatures.aspx (accessed 11 October 2013).

6. We see this issue with the usage of ethanol in gasoline with many environmental groups now against the very same ethanol policies they supported (http://www.ewg.org/agmag/2013/02/corn-ethanol-bad-farmers-consumers-and-environment; accessed 9 December 2013).