Governmental inspection and local legislation on environmental protection: Evidence from China

Using China's central inspection of environmental protection as a natural experiment, this paper adopts a difference-in-difference method to investigate how this campaign-style governance approach can influence the legislation process related to the conservation of nature. Our empirics find a significant facilitative effect on the enactment of local environmental protection laws in terms of both number and quality, and this facilitative effect is stronger in provinces and regions with weaker legal basis and greater environmental pollution. Moreover, we show that this facilitative effect has already begun to generate favorable judicial consequences. As for policy implications, we not only provide an overall evaluation on the performance of the central inspection, but also demonstrate China's top–down campaign-style governance indeed has a long-lasting impact on the establishment of its institutions.