Local institutions, political control, and community characteristics: Analyzing effectiveness and responsiveness of federal water quality regulations

The literature on political control of regulatory agencies generally focuses on evaluating traditional “command-and-control” regulations from the perspective of the central political institutions. This dissertation extends those studies by analyzing federal regulatory enforcement from the perspective of the targeted local policy arena, focusing on local institutions and the nature of the collective action problems that federal regulations were intended to correct. In particular, my study examines the hypothesis that local institutions concerned with the same collective action problems increase both enforcement efforts of the agencies and the effectiveness of federal regulation in increasing compliance.; The empirical analysis focuses on the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) and the Clean Water Act (CWA). This dissertation uses plant-level compliance and enforcement data drawn from the Permit Compliance System (PCS) database of the EPA to analyze the joint response of the enforcement agency and the regulated permit-holders to local and central political factors. A modified detection controlled estimation (DCE) model is utilized to overcome statistical problems relating to the partial detection of noncompliance. Results of this dissertation show that local institutions concerned with managing water pollution provide incentives for agencies to enforce more stringedly and for permit-holders to comply at higher levels than they would in the absence of the local institutions.