The Effect of Special District Government on Environmental Compliance

• In Event: Environmental Regulations

Abstract

Single purpose governments, or special districts, are the local government unit responsible for service delivery for large portions of the United States. There are currently over 38,000 special districts in the United States (US Census Bureau 2012), but despite their prevalence as a form of local government, they remain woefully understudied in political science. Special districts are especially important for environmental policy, since a large number of special districts in the United States are responsible for delivering water and wastewater services to local citizens. Local governments play an integral role in the implementation of federal environmental policy as regulated entities (Switzer 2018, Teodoro and Switzer 2016), and yet the effect of local government specialization on environmental compliance has not yet been examined. The goal of this paper is to understand the differences between special districts and municipal governments in the implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).

Separate from the work on special districts, a large literature in urban politics has addressed the responsiveness of municipal governments to citizen preferences. Until recently, most of the work on local government suggested that, due to political constraints and the competitive nature of local government service provision, local governments should be relatively unresponsiveness to the ideology and political preferences of citizens (Burns and Gamm 1997, Tiebout 1956, Peterson 1981). Despite this, recent work has begun to investigate the possibility that municipal governments are indeed quite responsive to the preferences of the citizens they serve (Einstein and Kogan 2016, Tausanovitch and Warshaw, Gerber 2013). In my own work, I have found that this responsiveness extends to environmental protection, finding that municipal compliance with the SDWA is superior in municipalities with higher levels of democratic vote share (Switzer 2018).

That municipal environmental protection is in part determined by the political preferences of citizens is crucial to the debate over local government specialization, which largely revolves around the relative responsiveness of general purpose and specialized governments. Supporters of specialization suggest that in addition to being more focused and efficient in service provision, special districts should be more responsive to the citizens they serve (Ostrom, Bish, and Ostrom 1988) Critics of specialization suggest the opposite, arguing that due to overlapping government boundaries and the relatively quiet nature of special district politics, they will actually be less responsive to citizens and more responsive to business interests (Burns 1994). It has been shown that municipal governments are responsive to citizens, and that this impacts the level of local environmental compliance. If special districts are more or less responsive than municipal governments then specialization may have major impacts on environmental compliance.

This paper explores this possibility. I first argue that special districts should outperform municipal governments when it comes to environmental compliance, due to economies of scale, specialized focus, and greater professionalization, but not necessarily due to greater responsiveness. Building on Mullin’s (2008) theory of the conditional effect of specialization, however, I argue that while special districts will generally lead to higher levels of compliance with environmental legislation, this will depend on the level of citizen engagement. I argue that when citizens are more liberal, and therefore environmentally oriented, the effect of specialization will be lessened, since municipal governments will be incentivized to respond to the desire for greater environmental protection.

In order to test the differences between special districts and municipalities with respect to environmental protection, I analyze thousands of local government utilities’ compliance with the SDWA. I begin by testing a national dataset of all special districts and municipalities serving greater than 10,000 people. This allows me to investigate the general difference between special districts and municipalities. I then focus on California utilities in order to understand the conditional effect of specialization. Using GIS, I match special districts and municipalities to voting returns from recent presidential elections, testing the interaction between democratic vote share and specialization on environmental protection.

Author

• David Switzer, University of Missouri