Diffusion of environmental protectionism: Single-use plastic bags ban policy in California

Abstract

As California became the first state to ban the usage of single-use plastic bags due to popular vote, investigating the influence of social networks together with social economic attributes on the implementation of environmental regulatory policy becomes increasingly important. By incorporating different methods, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of how social network and socio-economic attributes contributed to the change of people’s choice on environmental regulatory policy adoption and its implementation. This study uses Pooled OLS model with centrality measures from the network, demographics, and locations to generalize insights to policy diffusion across cities in California, as the core attributes influence population’s the preference on policy adoption. This paper offers insights on environmental policy adoption, and the same methodological approaches can be applied to other policy studies.