Pollution for p romotion： Does senior government leaders'green attention matter？

Abstract Does the green attention of senior government leaders reinforce the relationship between environmental performance and local officials’ promotion? To examine the factors that might influence this issue in China, we builds a theoretical linkage between senior government leaders’ green attention and the green governance of officials. Inter-provincial panel data from 2001-2016 were used to examine how the green attention of senior government officials alters political incentives and influences the environmental governance behaviour of local officials. We find that the dualistic logic of local governments’ environmental governance lies in the green attention allocation of senior government leaders. When senior government leaders pay more attention to environmental governance, local officials are more likely to be motivated to govern the environment. As the effect of environmental governance in officials’ jurisdictions is significantly improved, their promotion probability increases as well. We also accounts for the degree of attention allocation variables, and the results suggest that greater environmental pollution reduces the prospect of officials’ promotion, but this effect is significantly negative only in years with a high level of attention allocation.