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The theory of social construction and policy design is insightful for exploring the circumstances in which the allocation of policy benefits and burdens is attributed to the feed‐forward effect of degenerative policy that institutionalizes bias and reinforces the prevailing categorization and embedded social meaning regarding target populations. However, this theoretical framework has not been broadly adopted to analyze the environment‐related phenomena. With a nationwide, block‐group‐level sample, this study examines the extent to which degenerative policies pertaining to immigrants influence state agencies' environmental regulatory outputs for predominantly Latino communities. Results show that in the states with moderately to most restrictive immigrant policy and high levels of Latino representation in legislatures, the rigorousness of government agencies' compliance monitoring activities decreases for Latino neighborhoods of environmental justice concern, as states' policy stance toward immigrants becomes more unfavorable. More Latino elected officials do not bolster policy implementation efforts for the vulnerable communities or offset the backlash effect of immigrant policy.

Public organizations function in an environment of goal multiplicity and constantly juggle goal trade-off and synergy. However, little empirical research explores how the potential conflict between effectiveness and equity affects government agencies' decision making. This study examines the extent to which public agencies are committed to regulatory effectiveness and social equity in environmental policy management, and the circumstances under which administrative agencies engage in goal trade-off and synergy. Analyzing data on the Clean Air Act in New York State, this study finds that although regulatory effectiveness is salient to government's policy implementation, equity-oriented policy is likely to give rise to trade-off in this goal domain. The state agency manages environmental programs in an equitable way, and policy intervention has inconsistent effects on the equity goal achievement. The agency does, in some instances, synergize two goals in loci reflecting the convergence of task demands, but equity-oriented policy does not reinforce such behavioral pattern. Findings beg the question regarding how public policies and programs can be devised in ways that help avert goal trade-off and engender the maximum level of social outcomes.

AbstractThe absence of a clear definition of environmental justice areas has been cited as one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's major deficiencies in managing federal environmental justice programs. Several states have explicitly defined potential environmental justice areas and integrated targeted efforts into the policy‐making process. At the block‐group level, this study evaluates the effects of New York State's environmental justice policy, which defines communities of concern in terms of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics as well as mandates supplemental regulatory enforcement activities for these neighborhoods, on the agency's policy implementation practices under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. The empirical findings suggest that there is inconclusive evidence regarding race/ethnicity‐ and class‐based environmental inequity. Also, the state's policy intervention is not universally effective. Moreover, task environments of a given community are a consistent determinant of the agency's regulatory compliance monitoring and assurance activities. This study then derives broader implications regarding the adoption of a policy instrument that defines and screens potential environmental justice communities.

AbstractDespite a voluminous literature on resource availability and the implications for organizational performance, little is known about how changes in government agencies' resources impact their policy implementation activities and goal prioritization. This article explores how changes in resources affect regulatory enforcement activities by types of resources and policy implementation activities, and whether resource cutbacks prompt a tradeoff of the effectiveness‐equity goals. Using the block‐group level data on the Clean Air Act (CAA) implementation from 2012 to 2019, we find that state environmental agencies prioritize regulatory effectiveness over environmental justice by concentrating their resources on communities where task demands correspond to organizations' core missions. They also promote social equity to some extent when facing spending cutbacks but not staffing cuts. Spending cutbacks had a less severe impact on compliance inspections for more socially vulnerable communities, while those exposed to more imminent environmental harms received more inspections.

As profit-seeking corporations, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have incentives to maximize profits from economic activities. However, subject to state ownership, SOEs are expected also to be more accountable for public welfare than their private counterparts. This study examines whether SOEs' relative provincial dominance reinforces government's demand to reduce air pollution in China, in the context of anticorruption and performance management. The results suggest that greater relative SOE dominance reduces sulfur dioxide emissions, but this effect is significant only in provinces with a low level of corruption case investigations. Performance management has no discernible moderating impact on the effect of SOE relative dominance.

Abstract
This article examines whether gender representation of government leadership in the legislative and executive branches improves social equity related to women's social outcomes and how this effect is moderated by the status of democracy. Using a panel data set on 135 OECD and non‐OECD countries from 2005 to 2015, the analysis shows that in non‐OECD countries, political gender representation has a significant, positive impact on female educational attainment and overall gender equality, while bureaucratic gender representation is significant for educational attainment only. For OECD countries, political representation has a consistent effect on educational attainment, labor force participation, and overall gender equality, but there is no evidence of bureaucratic representation. Democratization plays a more critical role in shaping the relationship between institutional representation and women's social outcomes in non‐OECD countries than their OECD counterparts, where gender equality is attributable to broader social, economic, and cultural factors.

The compatibility of merit principles and diversity management is particularly intriguing in theory and practice. Although theoretical arguments for merit-based practices and diversity management are well established, the effect of their dynamics on governmental performance remains an empirical issue. This article examines the effect of merit principles, workforce diversity, and diversity management on government performance, and inquires about whether diversity management efforts moderate the effect of merit-based practices. Analyzing a combined data set on federal agencies, this study finds that merit-based practices and diversity management have independent positive impact on organizational performance, but there is no significant relationship between workforce diversity and performance. Furthermore, the effect of merit-based practices on organizational performance is moderated by gender diversity and diversity management. Specifically, if an agency has a more diverse workforce in terms of gender or more effective diversity management efforts, the positive effect of merit-based practices on organizational performance is strengthened.

Little is known about the effects of two prominent public sector reforms—anticorruption efforts and high‐powered incentive systems—on the accomplishment of policy goals in the absence of the rule of law and in the presence of an extrinsic incentive to take advantage of corruption to achieve performance targets. This study explores how performance rewards and anticorruption efforts jointly affect administrative outputs and policy outcomes. We examine China's air pollution control policy with province‐level panel data. The analysis shows that performance rewards prompt administrative outputs that are linked to the incentive structure. Anticorruption activities have small significant, positive effects on those outputs only prior to the inception of high‐powered rewards, but have no significant effect on policy outcomes, regardless of the measure. The introduction of performance incentives contributes to the achievement of policy outcomes only when their measurement is subject to government manipulation.