About

Megan Mullin is a Professor of Public Policy at UCLA and holds the Luskin Endowed Chair in Innovation and Sustainability. She is also the Faculty Director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, which collaborates with civic leaders on research aimed at advancing equitable public policy to address environmental challenges. Mullin's research examines how coordination problems, accountability failure, and inequality in environmental risks and benefits influence political responses to environmental change. Her recent projects focus on the governance and finance of urban water services, public opinion about climate change, and the local politics of climate adaptation. She has also published on federalism, election rules and voter turnout, and local and state institutional design. Her work has appeared in prominent journals such as Nature, Science, the American Political Science Review, and the American Journal of Political Science. Mullin has received multiple awards from the American Political Science Association, including the Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for her book, 'Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water.' She earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and has served on the faculties at Temple University and Duke University prior to joining UCLA in 2023. Her research is funded by organizations including the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey, and she works regularly with policymakers, with her research and commentary featured in various media outlets. In 2020, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Economics
• Computer Security
• Business
• Political Science
• Ecology
• Environmental resource management
• Political economy
• Geography
• Environmental engineering
• Environmental science
• Finance
• Law
• Environmental ethics
• Microeconomics
• Natural resource economics
• Macroeconomics
• Economic growth
• Psychology
• Biology
• Environmental planning

Selected publications

• Redefining expectations for urban water supply systems to fight wildfires

  Nature Water · 2025-03-05 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Assessing Drinking Water Systems to Improve Performance and Capacity

  American Water Works Association · 2024-05-15

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Key Takeaways Fragmented data across state agencies and subagencies reduce the ability to assess a community water system's overall condition. Identifying relationships among different dimensions of performance can help assess how well systems respond to challenges. Balancing affordability with capacity for reliable drinking water delivery over time is an ongoing challenge for many utilities. Focusing only on safe drinking water compliance in research and oversight may overlook systems with other critical vulnerabilities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Local News Reporting and Mass Attitudes on Infrastructure Investment

  Political Behavior · 2024-05-02 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract A growing body of research documents how shrinking local newsrooms undermine political accountability and local fiscal and policy performance in the United States. We extend this work to examine political impacts from the level of information content in local news, which has been jeopardized by reductions in newsroom staffing. To understand how information content affects public response to news coverage of a local issue, we focus on the case of preventive spending on infrastructure maintenance and repair. Inefficiently low levels of infrastructure investment are often attributed to low public knowledge about the risk of failure events. In a preregistered survey experiment, we test how the level and type of information in a news article affect support for infrastructure investment across two different types of infrastructure risk (repeated nuisance versus catastrophic failure). For both types of risk, we find that more information-rich reporting, whether investigative or event-driven, increases public support for preventive spending and imposes accountability penalties on local leaders who fail to invest in prevention.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: US Partisan Polarization on Climate Change: Can Stalemate Give Way to Opportunity?

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-05-30 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Partisan polarization is a signature element of the US political landscape, and the politics of climate change is no exception. Here we document the rise in polarization in US climate politics and discuss its role in hampering national and state policy making to address the climate change problem. We then turn to three developments taking place in polarization’s shadow that may generate opportunities for meaningful action on mitigation and adaptation. First, party division has recently been accompanied by increased internal party cohesion on climate change, leaving the Democratic Party more unified on the need to address the problem and more willing to bear the political costs required to enact substantive mitigation policies. Second, even while state policy making largely reflects the broader partisan divide, clean energy expansion is underway in many Republican-dominated states. Finally, we show that the deleterious effects of climate change are projected to ultimately fall more heavily on Republican voters than on Democrats, scrambling the partisan politics of adaptation compared to that of mitigation.

  PublisherDOI

• Delivering on Environmental Justice? U.S. State Implementation of the Justice40 Initiative

  Publius The Journal of Federalism · 2023-05-19 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract President Biden has committed to a “whole of government approach” to address environmental and climate justice, which includes directing resources to historically underserved and overburdened populations. The Justice40 program is one of the signature programs in these efforts, requiring that 40 percent of the benefits of designated programs be targeted to disadvantaged communities. Because many federal spending programs that are part of the Justice40 initiative involve the transfer of funds from federal agencies to state governments, the Biden Administration will need the assistance of state officials if the initiative is to achieve its stated objectives. In this article, we study early state implementation of Justice40 in the area of transportation, focusing on the federal highway program and the new National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program. Our analysis of interviews with state officials and state NEVI plans reveals only modest differences between states in Justice40 implementation based on the partisanship of gubernatorial leadership, despite outspoken resistance to the initiative from many Republican governors. We also find that states that have made previous policy and institutional commitments to allocate resources in a manner similar to Justice40 are generally more receptive to this federal initiative.

  PublisherDOI

• What People Learn About Drinking Water Disruptions From Local Newspapers

  American Water Works Association · 2023-05-30 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Key Takeaways News coverage is an important avenue for the public to learn about infrastructure vulnerabilities. Analysis of 10 years of newspaper coverage of disruptions to drinking water service in North Carolina reveals low frequency of reporting about such events and no trend over time. Hurricanes and weather‐related events accounted for a small portion of reported disruptions. Newspaper coverage can help build public and political support for actions to reduce water system vulnerability.

  PublisherDOI

• US Partisan Polarization on Climate Change: Can Stalemate Give Way to Opportunity?

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2023-09-07 · 38 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The rise of climate change on the global political agenda coincided with the growth of partisan polarization in US politics and, in many ways, their trajectories mirror one another. When the climate crisis first began to attract political attention 30 years ago, Republicans and Democrats responded with similar levels of interest and concern. Today, partisan division overwhelms all other aspects of climate-change politics and environmental politics more broadly (Egan, Konisky, and Mullin 2022; Egan and Mullin 2017).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Local News and the Electoral Incentive to Invest in Infrastructure

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-07-08 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Despite broad public support, investment in U.S. infrastructure has not kept pace with growth, population shifts, and rising exposure to climate change risks. One explanation lies in politicians’ electoral incentives: because, in the short term, voters see only the costs of investment and not its benefits, politicians have incentive to pander and spend less than what they or their fully-informed constituents would prefer. Local newspapers could help reduce this constraint by increasing politicians’ confidence that voters will receive information that justifies higher spending. In a survey experiment, we found that informing U.S. city and county elected officials about news coverage of infrastructure failures increased support for a costly investment for those in competitive electoral settings. When motivated by reelection, politicians need the benefits of investment to be visible in order to justify its costs. Our results demonstrate the political importance of the nonpolitical news covered in local newspapers.

  PublisherDOI

• Buyouts with rentbacks: a policy proposal for managing coastal retreat

  Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences · 2022-04-23 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The discussion of adaptation to climate change in coastal areas has focused on short-term risk reduction and climate-proofing, but there is growing recognition that—at some point in the future—relocation to less vulnerable geographical areas will become necessary for large numbers of residents in many coastal communities. Spontaneous relocations that occur after catastrophic events can entail high costs, both for those who resettle elsewhere and for the remaining community. Managed retreat attempts to reduce such costs, thereby facilitating the relocation process. Property buyouts, the most prominently discussed policy tool for managed retreat, present significant challenges in terms of equity, timing, finance, and scale. We discuss innovation in buyout policy that allows residents to remain in their homes as renters after being bought out. We develop the basic structure of such a policy and show the pathways through which it can help to finance buyouts, harmonize public and private decision-making, and manage the timing of community transition. We also recommend funding mechanisms and other details to overcome the substantial barriers to implementation. Although buyouts with rentbacks will require institutional innovation in order to serve as an effective policy framework, the policy has the potential to improve social, economic, and environmental outcomes from the eventual unfortunate but necessary migration away from coastal areas.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Barriers to water infrastructure investment: Findings from a survey of U.S. local elected officials

  PLOS Water · 2022-08-16 · 31 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Investment in U.S. drinking water infrastructure is not keeping pace with need, contributing to water service failures that threaten public health, economic development, and community water security. Many explanations for lagging investment focus on the motivations of local elected officials, but those explanations are not rooted in research on elected officials’ own expressed views. We surveyed a representative nationwide sample of approximately 500 city and county officeholders about their perceptions of need for investment and barriers to meeting that need. Analysis of closed-ended and open-ended question responses reveals that the main barriers to investment are financial: incumbents weigh the cost of capital projects against the debt burden and affordability challenge created by those investments. Their concern about public opposition to rate increases is an important constraint on decisions to invest in water infrastructure. Our results also demonstrate disparities across communities in the perceived fiscal burden of water infrastructure. The great majority of elected officials expressed little concern about the condition of infrastructure in their own communities, but concern about infrastructure condition was positively correlated with concern about making investments, pointing to the financial stress for decision makers who bear the expense of deteriorating water systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Patrick J Egan

  Tharawal Aboriginal

  12 shared

• Katy Hansen

  12 shared

• Richard C. Feiock

  8 shared

• Thad Kousser

  Yale University

  8 shared

• Kevin Arceneaux

  University of Amsterdam

  7 shared

• Emily Bell

  5 shared

• Dorothy M. Daley

  4 shared

• Simon A. Andrew

  University of North Texas

  3 shared

Education

• PH.D., POLITICAL SCIENCE

  University of California Berkeley

  2005

Awards & honors

• Lynton Keith Caldwell Award from the American Political Scie…