Inspector‐Level Bureaucracy: Drilling Into Discretion in a State Natural Resource Agency

ABSTRACT Compliance and discretion are central concerns of public administration scholarship. Yet less is known about the revealed outputs of state regulators who operate in a more constrained decision‐making space known as discretion‐as‐granted. This study addresses that gap through a longitudinal analysis that examines inspector‐level decision‐making from 2012 to 2021 in Pennsylvania, a leading natural gas producing state. Utilizing an original dataset of over 365,000 oil and gas site inspections, we assess how inspectors utilize discretion through stringent or lenient enforcement choices , which follows the identification of a violation ( n = 33,136). We focus our investigation on the relationships between inspector experience and site characteristics and the implementation of specific regulatory actions. Our findings reveal that inspector experience contributes to a willingness to adopt stricter enforcement measures. Moreover, inspectors are more likely to adopt stricter enforcement actions following the identification of environmental, health, and safety violations and as a response to citizen complaints.