TSPA News
Konisky Study on Environmental Regulator Attitudes Published
Posted: 9/2/2008Dr. David Konisky’s study, “Regulator Attitudes and the Environmental Race to the Bottom Argument,” was recently published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. The study argues that concerns that interstate economic competition will lead states to relax their environmental regulation, potentially resulting in a race to the bottom, remain commonplace in both academic and public policy debates about state environmental policy. Most of the existing empirical work examining the race to the bottom argument tests the behavioral predictions of the argument. In this article, Konisky focuses on the attitudinal predictions. Specifically, he examines whether state regulators express beliefs consistent with what we would expect to observe if a race to the bottom dynamic operates within state regulatory decision making. Studying data from the State Environmental Managers Survey, Konisky finds that state regulators are sensitive to the effects that their regulatory decisions have on industry investment decisions and that their agencies are influenced by the regulatory decision making of economic competitor states. The journal is available at http://jpart.oxfordjournals.org/