Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Every major environmental statute in the United States allows for citizen participation. Of particular interest for this research, enforcement agencies maintain web, phone, and mail hotlines through which citizens can submit complaints. Complaints often stem from odor, dust, visible industrial emissions, poor equipment maintenance, or unusual wastewater discharges and may or may not involve violations of environmental regulations. The conventional wisdom about citizen complaints is that they enhance regulatory effectiveness (and possibly regulatory efficiency) by bringing attention to pollution problems undetected by costly regulatory monitoring. However, the extent to which environmental complaints impact the behaviors of regulators and facilities remains poorly understood. Our paper fills this gap.

This is the first research paper to systematically analyze the causes and consequences of citizen complaints for industrial emissions under the United States Clean Air Act (CAA). We study this topic for three reasons. First, it is not obvious that complaints influence regulator or facility behavior in practice. Regulatory agencies receive thousands of complaints of uncertain reliability, often from small groups of persistent complainers. If a majority of these are unrelated to severe problems, then recognition need not change the enforcement decisions of regulators. If citizen complaints crowd out public monitoring, then while public enforcement resources may shift, there may be no detectable change in the compliance outcomes of regulated facilities. Second, citizen complaints are fundamental mechanisms of accountability in governance, for both regulated entities and regulators themselves. Citizen complaints may increase regulated facilities’ risk of inspection and sanction, as expected, but large clusters of citizen complaints may also increase public regulators’ risk of unwanted attention from politicians and voters. If the inclination to lodge complaints increases with education, then complaints represent an alternative mechanism for explaining the observed relationship between education and the demand for environmental quality. Third, citizen complaint channels offer opportunities for “next generation compliance” tools that emphasize disclosure and other strategies to leverage community pressure to achieve more compliance with lower public resource outlays.

Our goal is to understand the determinants of CAA citizen complaints, the implications of CAA citizen complaints on public regulator behavior, and the impacts of CAA citizen complaints on pollution emissions. We first propose a conceptual framework for understanding the causes and consequences of citizen complaints. We then analyze empirically a novel dataset on more than 50,000 citizen complaints filed with the Texas Department of Environmental Quality between 2003 and 2014. We combine these data with extensive facility-level establishment characteristics, emissions, compliance, enforcement, and investigations data for the universe of over 115,000 regulated point sources of air pollution operating in the state of Texas. We take several empirical approaches, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Our most rigorous approach exploits variation in wind speed and direction for identification, as these contribute to variation in observed complaints but plausibly not to direct variation in other outcomes.