Regulatory Stringency and Policy Adoption: Reassessment of Renewable Portfolio Standards

Policy Studies Journal, 2012

Posted: 23 Feb 2013

See all articles by Sanya Carley

Sanya Carley

Indiana University Bloomington - School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Chris Miller

Independent

Date Written: 2012

Abstract

Renewable energy policy has far-reaching implications for national and international economic, environmental, and political sustainability, but thus far within the United States it has been almost entirely the province of state governments. This article examines the factors motivating state-level policymakers to adopt different forms of a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), highlighting the distinction between degrees of policy stringency, ranging from entirely voluntary participation to rigorous and strictly enforced targets. In the process we introduce a new metric for assessing stringency, more precise and reliable than the various proxies used previously, and analyze its relationship to drivers of policy adoption. We find that policies of different stringencies are motivated by systematically different underlying factors. State-level citizen political ideology is a significant predictor of RPS policy adoption, particularly for “voluntary” and “weak” policy designs. “Strong” policy designs, on the other hand, are best predicted by ideology at the government level, i.e., the degree of institutional liberalism. These findings may inform current implementation and program evaluation efforts, and potentially point the way toward more effective policy choices if and when an RPS moves forward on the national policy agenda, while the stringency metric central to this analysis can be of use to other policy scholars concerned with topics both within and beyond the realm of energy policy.

Keywords: renewable portfolio standard, electricity market, energy policy, policy adoption, citizen ideology, renewable energy

Suggested Citation

Carley, Sanya and Miller, Chris, Regulatory Stringency and Policy Adoption: Reassessment of Renewable Portfolio Standards (2012). Policy Studies Journal, 2012, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2222200

Sanya Carley (Contact Author)

Indiana University Bloomington - School of Public and Environmental Affairs ( email )

1315 East Tenth Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
United States

Chris Miller

Independent ( email )

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