Public Preferences for Environmental Policy Responsibility

examines citizens ’ preferences for assigning policy responsibility for environmental problems to different levels of government. I find that the public generally prefers the federal government to take the lead in addressing most issues, particularly those that relate to pollution and those that have a national or global scale.The public, however, prefers to give more responsibility to state and local governments to handle local-level issues. These results suggest a desire among many in the public to match governmental policy assignment with the geographic scale of the problem. The best predictor of individual’s choice of government level is political orientation, and to a lesser extent one’s general confidence in each level of government. Should the responsibility to address environmental problems rest with the national or subnational levels of government? This question has been at the center of a long-standing debate about the institutional design of environmental policy in the United States (Anderson and Hill 1997; Esty 1996; Kraft and Scheberle 1998), and in other federal systems of government, such as Canada (Harrison 1996) and Germany (Rose-Ackerman 1995). For much of the past half century, U.S. envi-ronmental policy can, in part, be characterized, as a tug-of-war between federal