A new perspective on the U.S. energy efficiency: The political context.

This paper offers a new perspective on the energy efficiency literature by bringing evidence of political contextual factors as the predictors of energy efficiency. Specifically, we posit that the Democrat administration is more energy-efficient considering the reduction of environmental impact, in contrast, the Republican administration is more efficient considering only financial expenditures leading to the production of economic growth. In addition, we predict that political administration tenure is negatively correlated with green energy efficiency and that political distancing moderates the relationship between political party administration and energy efficiency. This study sheds light on these matters by performing an efficiency analysis of fifty North American states through a bootstrap DEA non-parametric model, followed by Tobit regressions to evaluate our hypotheses concerning the effect of the contextual factors on the calculated efficiency scores. • We investigate the impact of political factors on energy efficiency in the United States. • We perform a two-stage DEA-Tobit bootstrapped regression analysis. • The Democrats consistently demonstrated higher energy efficiency scores. • The political tenure as a feature had mild or mixed impact on energy efficiency. • We confirmed the positive time-passage effect on energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]