Superior endorsement and bureaucratic compliance in China’s environmental enforcement

The influence of politics in policy implementation is a widespread global phenomenon, but bureaucratic responses to it remain understudied. This study examines how superior endorsement affects local officials’ compliance patterns with higher authorities’ administrative directives for regulating air pollution in China. Despite China’s stance on aligning environmental protection with socioeconomic development, we point out that superior endorsement might incentivize subordinates to downplay central policy intentions and fall in line with superior governments’ policy priorities through blunt measures. Drawing from an original dataset of Chinese officials, we find that local officials who acknowledge the importance of superior endorsement prefer to fulfill priority tasks of pollution regulation by shutting down polluting enterprises, even at high social and economic costs. However, the effect of superior endorsement is not statistically significant for officials who work in Party organizations and higher-level governments. Our results suggest that the prevalence of political control by superiors may enhance local policy effectiveness at the cost of diverging from institutionalized rule-based policy implementation.