Replication Data for: Playing Politics with Environmental Protection: The Political Economy of Designating Protected Areas

Protected areas play an important role in biodiversity conservation, but they also carry local costs in the form of constraints on natural resource extraction. We investigate how policymakers make trade-offs between national environmental benefits and local economic costs by examining the designation of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find causal evidence that the Brazilian government systematically over-designates protected areas in municipalities controlled by opposition mayors relative to municipalities controlled by mayors in the president's political coalition. In addition, we find evidence that this dynamic is likely driven by the economic interests of local elites in safe districts, and not by those of the municipal electorate. These results show that political considerations bias the geographic distribution of protected areas in the world's largest rainforest.