Policy Characteristics, Electoral Cycles, and the Partisan Politics of Climate Change

Abstract

Domestic policies are the cornerstone of the new global climate governance architecture. However, what motivates vote-seeking politicians to pursue climate policies remains remarkably unclear, as the climate politics literature suggests that climate policies are usually not perceived as a vote winner. The present article revisits this issue and argues that a better understanding of the relationship between electoral competition and climate policy making requires taking into account differences both in party ideologies and in policy characteristics. Studying twenty-nine democracies between 1990 and 2016, the analysis finds that climate policy production overall tends to increase as the election approaches due to increases in “soft” policies, such as subsidies, research grants, and information instruments, and relatively stable production rates of “hard” policies like taxes and regulations over the electoral term. Regarding partisan politics, left governments are found to produce more hard, but not more soft, climate policies than center and right governments, especially before elections. This suggests that partisan and electoral incentives are important reference points in the fight against climate change.

Electoral competition and the party politics of public investments

“…Non-green parties cannot credibly commit to be the most likely party to deliver investments in environmental protection, even if they have a high probability of victory, further reducing their incentives to promise more investments in environmental protection. Moreover, mainstream parties tend to be slow to make the environment salient, leaving the issue to more peripheral parties (Farstad, 2018) and left-wing parties are the only ones benefiting electorally from making the environment salient (Schulze, 2021).…”

Populism and nature—the nature of populism: New perspectives on the relationship between populism, climate change, and nature protection

“…The authors suggest that these differences are explained by left-right cleavages of host-ideologies, but not by populism per se. While left-wing governments tend to produce more climate policies on the aggregate level (Schulze 2021), Latin American case studies show that left-wing populist governments rarely break with extractivism and resource exploitation even if they campaigned against these policies initially (Andreucci 2018;Lyall and Valdivia 2019). When it comes to policy outcomes, research by Detlef Jahn (2021) argues that populists in government office produce more greenhouse gas emissions and are also linked to lower environmental performance in general (Böhmelt 2021).…”

The Challenging Paths to Net-Zero Emissions: Insights from the Monitoring of National Policy Mixes

“…This article focuses on the second order of policy change, namely, potential changes in the quantity and quality of policy instruments identifiable in administrative data. While sustained attention has been paid to the measurement and the determinants of policy change (Capano and Howlett 2009;Knill et al 2012), especially cross-cutting policy fields such as climate change have stimulated a strong interest in policy change at the aggregate level, namely across many different instrument types (Schaffrin et al 2015;Schulze 2021). One way to do so involves exploring different "policy mixes" (Capano and Howlett 2020), that is, the overall pattern of climate policy instruments adopted in different jurisdictions.…”