Hyperopia in City Hall: How Tap Water Failure Elsewhere Shapes Perceptions

• In Event: Water Governance Issues

Abstract

Local government water failures have garnered significant public interest over the past decade, with high profile failures in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi highlighting a troubling trend as drinking water infrastructure ages. In the United States, drinking water is a fundamentally local government issue. While Federal and State governments regulate drinking water quality, for the 85% of the American public that receives drinking water from local governments decisions over investment are ultimately subject to the desires of local elected officials.

While elected officials are largely responsible for drinking water infrastructure, we know very little about what influences their perceptions and policy preferences. There are a limited number of studies that have directly examined elected officials’ perceptions and preferences toward drinking water (Hughes et al. 2013, Hansen and Mullin 2022, Mullin and Hansen 2023). In this paper, I examine one aspect of elected officials’ drinking water perceptions, exploring how tap water failure in other communities influences how elected officials see their own communities.

In their recent book, Teodoro, Zuhlke, and Switzer (2022) define the concept of “tap water hyperopia.” Tap water hyperopia is a concept that observations of tap water failure in communities that a citizen identifies with will lead to concern about tap water in their own communities. Research has found that drinking water behavior and concern for infrastructure is not simply related to actual water and infrastructure quality. Rather, the primary driver is the perception of quality, which can be influenced by indirect as well as direct drivers (McSpirit and Reid 2011). The hyperopia argument suggests that the perceived quality and trustworthiness of drinking water in one’s own community is in part a function of observed tap water failure elsewhere, and specifically in communities where the consumer identifies with the victim of the crisis. This research builds on these existing studies by expanding the concept of hyperopia to elected officials. How does tap water failure elsewhere influence elected officials’ perceptions of the drinking water in their own community?

I examine this question using an original survey experiment conducted on 500 local elected officials in the United States. While the control group receives no information about tap water failure, the treatment exposes respondents to a failure in a large or small utility (as determined by the EPA) that is either in their state or in a faraway state. This will allow me to examine how proximity and similarity of failure influence perceptions. All the elected officials will then be asked about their level of concern for their drinking water utility, their perceptions that bottled water is safer and tastes better than their community’s tap water, and whether they would support a rate increase in their community. My expectation is that elected officials that are exposed to failure in other communities will have increased levels of concern over their own tap water, and the effect will be higher for proximate utilities and utilities that serve similar population levels.

There is strong evidence that high profile tap water failures have changed the perceptions and behaviors of the American public, even for those who have not themselves experienced failures. Examining whether elected officials experience hyperopia in the same way is crucial for our understanding of the dynamics that dictate their decision making.

Author

• David Switzer, University of Missouri