Peer Influence or Self-Drive? Behind Texas Municipalities’ Voluntary Energy Reporting Patterns

• In Event: Understanding Participation and Outcomes in Energy Programs - Evidence from Households, Cities, and States

Abstract

Many cities in the rapidly growing Texas Triangle – the metropolitan areas anchored by Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin-San Antonio – are EPA-designated non-attainment areas, experiencing air quality challenges. Since 2001, Texas’ state legislature has required local governments located in its 41 non-attainment counties to have a goal to reduce electricity consumption by 5 percent per year and report progress annually to the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO). Despite SECO’s efforts to streamline and standardize the reporting process over the years, between 2019 and 2025, only 241 (out of the 503 applicable) cities have reported their energy use through the SECO survey at least once, rendering this program de facto voluntary. Moreover, among these 241 cities, participation was not consistently sustained over time. We therefore proposed the research question: what explains the differences in cities’ voluntary energy reporting participation?

Existing literature has shown the importance of mimetic and normative pressures in shaping organizations’ participation in environmental programs (DiMaggio et al., 1983; Teodoro, 2014; Ji and Tate, 2021). We designed two variables – neighboring cities’ participation rate and COG (Council of Governments) peers’ participation rate in the previous year – to represent these two institutional factors and hypothesize that they could encourage cities’ participation in voluntary energy reporting. This is because cities are always concerned about peer competition and seek to replicate the success of others. Also, participation in COG-organized learning sessions and repeated interactions with member cities that have previously participated may establish energy reporting as a shared professional norm. We also designed a third variable – whether a city has a dedicated environmental office – to capture potential differences in cities’ administrative capacity to manage voluntary environmental programs. This is inspired by recent empirical studies, which found that cities with a specialized unit dedicated to sustainability issues are better positioned to engage in environmental programs (Krause et al., 2016; Feiock et al., 2017). In addition, we controlled for demographic, economic, and other city-level covariates that influence both the demand for local government environmental stewardship and the resources available for it (Lubell et al., 2009).

Our final sample consists of participation patterns of all 503 incorporated cities in Texas’ non-attainment counties between 2019 and 2025. We use a combination of binary logistic regressions and multinomial logit regressions to test our main hypotheses, and our results reveal several interesting observations. First, our models consistently show that normative pressure and mimetic pressure do not always reinforce each other in driving participation. When considered together, their effects partially offset one another. Second, normative pressure exerted through COG networks has a substantially larger impact on cities’ annual participation decision compared to neighboring cities’ influence. Third, although the presence of a dedicated environmental office does not consistently increase the likelihood of annual participation, it is a strong predictor of sustained participation over the full study period. These nuanced findings contribute to the literature on voluntary policy compliance and offer practical implications for public administration professionals in managing environmental programs.

Authors

• Ziyao Wang, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author

• Linlang He, University of North Texas
  Non-Presenting Co-Author