#political economy

Transboundary Pollution and Political Attribution

This paper studies how transboundary pollution enters domestic politics. When air pollution crosses borders, citizens may observe local pollution without knowing whether the source is foreign or domestic, creating scope for politicians either to provide information or to shift blame abroad. We study South Korea, where fine-dust episodes are salient and pollution from China is a recurring focus of public debate. Combining source-specific pollution shocks with a politician-day panel of Facebook posts by South Korean legislators, we distinguish between environmental attention and explicit attribution to China. Instrumental-variables estimates provide little evidence that exogenous increases in local PM2.5 raise politicians' broad environmental communication. By contrast, the clearest evidence consistent with strategic foreign attribution appears in partisan heterogeneity: conditional on discussing fine dust, conservative politicians increase foreign attribution in response to both transboundary and domestic shocks, whereas Democratic estimates are small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. Transboundary environmental problems thus affect politics through selective blame shifting rather than a uniform increase in foreign attribution.