Poster #119 - State Partisanship, Regulatory Pre-emption, and Responses to PFAS "Forever Chemicals" in the US

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

The question of how state legislative partisanship influences environmental policy design is a persistent one. While most would agree legislative partisanship has a role to play, research into the mechanisms that connect it to policy design is frequently siloed into studies of individual mechanisms, policy instruments, or issue areas. We use the emerging and timely issue of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as a lens through which to explore the question of how competing theorized mechanisms explain the connections between state legislative partisanship and policy design choices across diverse contexts, sectors, and policy instrument choices. PFAS, known colloquially as “forever chemicals” are a group of several thousand chemicals widely used in an array of consumer goods, from stain-resistant textiles and firefighting foam to medical devices and food packaging. Largely unregulated since their creation in the 1940s, these chemicals are now known to cause a range of health impacts in living beings even in small amounts and are highly persistent in the environment. While PFAS have been accumulating for decades, policymakers worldwide have only very recently begun to recognize and respond to the threat as new research on their harms has emerged. We employ a mixed methods approach, first using regression analysis to identify variables that are predictive of PFAS policy comprehensiveness and stringency across all 50 states. Preliminary results from this analysis confirm that state legislative partisanship is the primary predictor of PFAS policy outputs. We then take a qualitative comparative case study approach across 11 states, using document analysis of legislative records, media coverage, state agency reports, and NGO and community organization communiques to build a more nuanced understanding of how state legislative partisanship shapes policy design in practice. We find that the primary mechanisms are agenda-setting, the production of gridlock dynamics, preferences for regulatory pre-emption tools such as no-more-stringent-than-federal laws, and ideological openness to diverse interest groups. However, which mechanisms dominate varies across states due to differences in contextual features, notably the sources of contamination and influential industry interests within a state, and the policy objective (monitoring, remediation, standards-setting, and source control). These findings are highly consequential for the governance of emerging contaminants such as PFAS, microplastics, antibiotics, and others, where the federal government has largely ceded its traditional role in setting policy floors and delegated increasing autonomy to the states. Firstly, we demonstrate that the politics of your state are the key predictor of whether you will benefit from protective environmental policies, rather than salient issues such as the presence and intensity of contamination. Secondly, we demonstrate that state legislative partisanship acts across multiple mechanisms to help or hinder policy development. A key and concerning trend that we examine is the growth of regulatory pre-emption in red and purple states through no-more-stringent-than-federal and REINS-style laws. We conclude with a discussion of implications for environmental political theory and policy as the PFAS legislative and regulatory landscape moves swiftly forward.

Author

• Gemma Smith, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author