Explaining State Allocation Shares Under the Water Quality Act of 1987: Politics, Incrementalism, or Need?

John C Morris, Joseph Aistrup, Zoe Nemerever and Xiodan Zhang

Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2025, vol. 55, issue 2, 353-378

Abstract: What is the basis of the allocation of federal funding for wastewater treatment infrastructure? The Water Quality Act of 1987 changed the ways in which the national government helped to offset the costs of compliance with the Clean Water Act by changing the scheme to allocate grant funds to states. However, the available literature provides no clues as to how the allocations for each state were determined. Our model to predict state shares under the 1987 legislation includes policy need and population; we also include variables to represent each state’s influence in the House and Senate committees. We find that the most likely explanation for the 1987 allocation is incrementalism, although small-state representation on the Senate committee is positively correlated with higher allocation amounts. This research contributes to our understanding of federal legislative funding allocation formulae, particularly for environmental infrastructure programs.

Keywords: water policy; environmental infrastructure; congressional committee politics; water quality need (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pjae045 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:publus:v:55:y:2025:i:2:p:353-378.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Publius: The Journal of Federalism is currently edited by Paul Nolette and Philip Rocco

More articles in Publius: The Journal of Federalism from CSF Associates Inc. Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().