WORKING PAPER - Particulates Matter: Policy Failures, Air Pollution, and Collective Political Participation

We specifically focus on the class of policy failures that reflect a gap between the collective interest in a public good and the government’s provision of it, such as the U. [...] The effect of the quadratic measure of air pollution is positive and significant at the 10-percent level, while the effect of our original measure of air pollution is negative and significant. [...] First, we use data from the Center for Disease Control on the county-level prevalence of chronic pulmonary obstructive disease (COPD) in 2019 to investigate whether the physical effects of air pollution explain the negative relationship between PM2.5 and participation we estimate. [...] Two measures of external efficacy are available at the congressional district level from the 2020 wave of the American National Election Study.13 Accordingly, we aggregate our data up to the congressional district level and test whether air pollution in 2018 is associated with perceptions of external efficacy in 2020.14 It seems plausible that air pollution reduces political participation because. [...] An average air-day in Delhi may be so severe—relative to average levels of pollution in the United States— that it would expand political participation in the United States, similar to the effects of climate-related disasters (Hazlett and Mildenberger 2020; Koubi et al.