Centralization and Accountability: Theory and Evidence from the Clean Air Act
Federico Boffa
Università di Macerata and IEB
Amedeo Piolatto
IEB, Universitat de Barcelona
Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto
CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Barcelona GSE
First draft, 15 October 2011 –This draft, 12 April 2012
ABSTRACT: This
paper studies fiscal federalism when voter information varies across regions. We
develop a model of political agency with heterogeneously informed voters. Rent seeking
politicians provide public goods to win the votes of the informed. As a result,
rent extraction is lower in regions with higher information. In equilibrium,
electoral discipline has decreasing returns. Thus, political centralization efficiently
reduces aggregate rent extraction. The model predicts that a region’s benefits
from centralization are decreasing in its residents’ information. We test this
prediction using panel data on pollutant emissions across U.S. states. The 1970
Clean Air Act centralized environmental policy at the federal level. In line
with our theory, we find that centralization induced a differential decrease in
pollution for uninformed relative to informed states.
Keywords: Political centralization, Government accountability, Imperfect information, Interregional heterogeneity, Elections, Environmental policy, Air pollution