Promoting the polluters? The competing objectives of energy efficiency, pollutant emissions, and economic performance in Chinese municipalities

•Like economic performance, energy efficiency and pollutant emissions can also significantly affect promotion probability of municipal party secretaries in China, among which economic performance plays a major role.•The impacts that economic performance, energy efficiency and pollutant emissions have on municipal party secretaries’ promotion probability evolve differently from 2005 to 2015, showing as significant decline, slight decline and steady increase, respectively.•Relative influence of economic performance decreases slightly but always holds main position from 2005 to 2015, energy efficiency's relative influence declines continuously while that of pollutant emissions increases significantly. With the rapid development of China's economy, energy efficiency and pollutant emissions have also entered our horizons and become two big issues. To explore the impacts that these three factors have on the promotion probability of municipal party secretaries, we have collected the data of 810 municipal party secretaries with position changes in the period of 2005–2015 and mainly adopted the probit model to conduct our empirical tests. Our results are as follows: (1) Higher economic performance, higher energy efficiency and lower pollution emissions can significantly increase the promotion probability of municipal party secretaries; (2) these three correlations evolve differently, the impact of economic performance declines slightly but always predominates, the impact of pollutant emission tends to grow while that of energy efficiency continues to decrease. This research provides a dynamic understanding of Chinese local officials’ promotion incentive and their trade-off among economy, energy and environment, which would be a valuable supplement for Institution Change Theory and an important reference for other countries with similar developing dilemma.