The Politics of Climate Investment: Investigating the Role of Equity and Partisanship in IRA and BIL Allocations
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Investing in a greener America has become politically polarized due to conflicting ideological views concerning the role of government and the tradeoff between economic well-being and environmental stewardship. In order to garner support for emerging environmental policies, objective, empirical research is needed to understand how the benefits from funding are shared across demographic and political groups. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 were passed as the largest commitments from the U.S. government to promote a clean energy transition and build climate-resilient infrastructure. With them came the Justice40 initiative to promote the equitable distribution of their funding. While some studies showed that more spending in the IRA was directed to red states (E2, 2024), less is understood about how these funding patterns vary across counties with different demographic makeups, or how they compare with the BIL. I conducted a quantitative comparative analysis of the funding in both the BIL and the IRA to determine whether or not the policies favor the constituencies that supported them politically, and how allocations vary across demographic and geographic groups. Results showed that funding appears to be more closely related to Democratic partisanship in the BIL than in the IRA. Still, urbanized counties attract more funding across both policies, and this association accounts for some of the relationship between funding and partisanship. Furthermore, variables for race and income accounted for different fluctuations in funding for the IRA and the BIL, although differences in discretionary and formula spending could affect the federal government’s ability to direct funds to disadvantaged communities. Ultimately, understanding how these differences influence funding allocations and how the economic benefits of climate policy are distributed can help federal and state governments refine their implementation strategies.
Author: Jones, Talise
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7112217217