Andrew Waxman, PhD, Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas, will present the EEEP Seminar Series, “Paying at the Pump and the Ballot Box: Electoral Penalties of Motor Fuels Taxes” on April 23, 2025.
Abstract:
Perhaps the greatest challenge to addressing climate change comprehensively through government policy in the U.S. has been limited political feasibility. Waxman investigates whether politicians are punished by voters for increasing motor fuel taxes by compiling a comprehensive dataset on state legislative election outcomes and gasoline taxes. Leveraging a difference-in-discontinuities research design, he estimates the effect of legislated gasoline tax changes on incumbent state legislators’ subsequent electoral outcomes. For very close elections, he shows how the incumbency advantage attenuates when gasoline tax increases have been legislated in the intervening legislative session. Specifically, he finds a small, but economically and statistically meaningful decrease in the incumbency advantage of 1.3 to 1.9 percentage points for Republican and Democratic incumbents, respectively. This penalty represents 14–21\% of the overall electoral advantage of incumbents in our sample, which highlights the relative importance of environmental and energy taxes in voter priorities.
Bio:
Andrew Waxman is an assistant professor of economics and public policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and by courtesy in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Waxman is an applied microeconomist examining the relationship between environmental outcomes, urban and energy policies and inequality. Much of his work consists of trying to think about how policies and individual decisions have implications for levels of pollution through outcomes home electricity usage or commuting using personal vehicles. He has worked at understanding the economic effects of tolling, subway expansion and carbon capture and storage technology in the US and China. In 2022-3, Waxman was a Visiting Scholar at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.