Public opinion about energy can be understood in a unified framework. First, people evaluate key attributes of energy sources, particularly a fuel’s cost and environmental harms. Americans, for example, view coal as relatively inexpensive but harmful, natural gas as less harmful but more...

Attention to the need for greater stakeholder involvement in environmental decisionmaking has been increasing in recent years. The authors draw on a number of cases of environmental planning in the Great Lakes Region in an attempt to understand the possible benefits stakeholder processes can...

Studies of voter turnout across states find that those with more facilitative registration laws have higher turnout rates. Eliminating registration barriers altogether is estimated to raise voter participation rates by up to 10 per cent. This paper presents panel estimates of the effects of...

Community-based efforts to address environmental problems occupy an increasingly large space on the environmental policy landscape. Advocates argue that local environmental institutions (LEIs) can deliver both procedural and environmental quality benefits. Yet, despite over a decade of expansive...

This article examines several of the key hypotheses suggested by the race to the bottom theory in environmental regulation. The research studies annual state-level enforcement of federal air, water, and hazardous waste pollution control regulation, covering the period from 1985-2000....

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...

This article analyzes bureaucratic and public attitudes on the relationship between environmental regulation and the economy. Specifically, the analysis compares responses to the State Environmental Managers Survey – a 2005 survey of senior-level officials working in state environmental...

Objectives. This article examines environmental policy attitudes, focusing on the differences in preferences across issue type (i.e., pollution, resource preservation) and geographical scale (i.e., local, national, global). In addition, we study whether an individual's trust in government...

This paper examines whether state governments perform systematically less environmental enforcement of facilities in communities with higher minority and low-income populations. Although this is an important claim made by environmental justice advocates, it has received little attention in the...

The federal government adopted several measures during the mid-1990s to address concerns about race- 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...