Over the past three decades, China, Taiwan, and South Korea have become home to some of the world's most costly air pollution problems. In my dissertation, I propose a political institutional explanation for why these rapidly industrializing states experienced varying degrees of success resolving these problems. My explanation centers on political access--the extent to which institutional reforms transformed (1) popular elections; (2) political parties; (3) legislatures; and (4) non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into legitimate channels through which environmentalists can exert their influence over environmental policy decisions.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that access has limits: environmentalists can be paradoxically worse off when they enjoy more input into the policies they care about most. These limits arise because political systems that insulated pro-growth elites from pro-environmental pressures consistently eased the enactment of innovative regulations while concurrently weakening the administrative rules governing their enforcement. Political reforms that subsequently shifted authority from single-minded elites to strategically motivated politicians generated incentives to improve upon these initially lackluster regulatory efforts. The results of these attempts nevertheless varied, ranging from measures that strengthened traditional command-control regulations and empowered regulatory agencies to those that over-specified the administration of market-driven regulations and over-burdened regulatory agencies.
After constructing (chapter 1) and modifying (chapter 2) a theoretical framework consistent with this claim, I illustrate my argument empirically. Chapter 3 uses state-specific descriptions of key institutions and six additional data-driven techniques to demonstrate that Taiwan offered more access to environmentalists than Korea, which offered more access than China. In chapters 4 through 6, I employ two-stage policymaking narratives that trace the air pollution regulatory track records of China, Korea, and Taiwan after institutional reforms that offered environmentalists low, middling, and high levels of access to the policymaking process. I conclude by reflecting upon the study's methodological shortcomings and normative extensions.
My Research