How Elections Matter: Theory and Evidence from Environmental Policy

This paper explores to what extent secondary policy issues are
infuenced by electoral incentives. We develop a two dimensional
political agency model in which a politician decides on both a
frontline policy issue and a secondary policy issue. The model
predicts when the incumbent should manipulate the secondary policy
to attract voters. We test our model by using panel data on
environmental policy choices in the U.S. states. In contrast to the
popular view that secondary policies are largely determined by
lobbying, we find strong effects of electoral incentives.