“Environmental Policy Feedback: From Mayoral Field Visits to Clean Air,” Jonathan Elkobi, Yale

COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP

Abstract: Air pollution presents a core governance challenge in developing countries, where central government directives collide with local government incentives and create a principal-agent problem. Traditional approaches to environmental policymaking struggle to resolve this tension, particularly in decentralized systems with limited monitoring and enforcement capacity. This paper argues that an alternative strategy, grounded in localized information gathering and coalition building, can enable more effective environmental governance. Rather than relying solely on top-down directives or technocratic fixes, we emphasize the role of bureaucratic engagement in crafting policies through engagement with local stakeholders. We develop a theory of embedded policy learning, where local leaders actively engage in field research, listen to stakeholders, and cultivate local support for environmental policies. 
To test our theory, we collect a novel dataset of 700,000 public activity records of Chinese local officials from digitizing 3,800 local gazettes, in addition to 40,000 municipal policy documents, and satellite-based pollution data across 332 Chinese cities. Leveraging fixed-effects and a novel shift-share instrument design, we show that local leaders who invest more time in environmental field research adopt higher-quality environmental policies. Moreover, we find that local governments that conduct a lot of environmental field research significantly reduce air pollution. Where each environmental field research led, on average, to an immediate reduction of 2% in the local pollution levels.  We argue that one main mechanism in which the field research helps is through a larger coalition-building for a policy. To support that, we count the number of organizations per field research and show that when a higher number of stakeholders is involved in the field research, more policies will be enacted.  Our findings suggest that bureaucratic learning through immersive policy engagement can enhance the ability to fight air pollution in the short and long term. Thus, enhancing the local embeddedness through field visits of bureaucrats offers a promising route to push policy goals.

Jonathan Elkobi is a second-year PhD student in Political Science at Yale. His research utilizes innovations in computational methods to better study Chinese Politics.

Lunch will be served at 11:30 AM.