One of the forms of intervention in public services that lie beyond market forces is price control. While such regulation is justified by the need to achieve social goals, empirical evidence has shown that it is often used by politicians for electoral gain. This paper looks for evidence of opportunistic political behaviour in urban water pricing. Using data for 119 large Spanish cities covering the period 1998–2015, we find strong empirical evidence of the influence of the electoral cycle on water pricing insofar as price increases are significantly lower in the years immediately preceding municipal elections than in non-pre-election years. Furthermore, outsourcing water service provision does not mitigate the relationship between the electoral cycle and water pricing. This result could be explained by incomplete transfer of control rights when the urban water service is outsourced, which allows politicians to use their right to supervise water tariffs to their advantage.

In this paper we explore the existence of behavioral consistency between individuals’ pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors in related domains (cross-domain), distinguishing between the following two types of behaviors that the literature has identified as entailing different levels of sacrifice on the part of the individual: curtailment, i.e., implying the adoption of daily habits, and efficiency behaviors, i.e., installation of efficient devices. Using a dataset on bottled water demand from two cities in southern Spain, we find evidence of behavioral consistency between the undertaking of certain pro-environmental habits related to household water consumption and the decision to consume (or not) bottled water. These effects are found only when curtailment behaviors are considered, but not in relation to efficiency behaviors. Moreover, our results suggest that policies fostering pro-environmental habits could prove more successful than the ones promoting pro-environmental attitudes or awareness. These results have important implications for the design of environmental campaigns and rebate programs.