The impacts of environmental governance on political turnover of municipal party secretary in China

Abstract

Political incentive is one of the most efficient methods to promote local officials to push for both economic growth and environmental progress in the context of China. Since previous scholars have never investigated the relationships between political turnover and environmental governance at the municipal level, in this work, we proxy pollution by SO₂, COD, SOOT, and NHx and examine whether environmental performance affects the political turnover of the municipal party secretary by exploiting a panel conditional logit with a fixed-effect model for the period 2002–2013. The results indicate that environmental performance does not significantly impact the turnover of municipal party secretaries, offering evidence that an increase of SO₂ is associated with the likelihood of promotion under the panel multinomial logit approach. However, a higher GDP growth rate plays the determinant factor affecting the promotion of China's municipal party secretaries. Specific policy recommendations are proposed in accordance with our empirical findings.