The political economy of passing climate change legislation: Evidence from a survey

Fankhauser, Samuel; Gennaioli, Caterina; Collins, Murray

doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.08.008

Cited by 158 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 51 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Fankhauser, Gennaioli, and Collins (2015) find, for example, that only in Anglo-Saxon countries is there much evidence that parties on the left make more legislative efforts to address climate change than those on the right. In practical terms, if policymakers or environmental advocates could manipulate just one correlate, which would spur the biggest rise in public support for environmental protection?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts

Fairbrother¹

2016

SocScience

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Worldwide, most people share scientists' concerns about environmental problems, but reject the solution that policy experts most strongly recommend: putting a price on pollution. Why? I show that this puzzling gap between the public's positive concerns and normative preferences is due substantially to a lack of trust, particularly political trust. In multilevel models fitted to two international survey datasets, trust strongly predicts support for environmental protection within countries and, by some measures, among countries also. An influential competing theory holds that environmental attitudes correlate mostly with left versus right political ideology; the results here, however, show that this correlation is weaker and varies substantially from country to country-unlike that with trust. Theoretically, these results reflect that environmental degradation is a collective action problem and environmental protection a public good. Methodologically, they derive from the more flexible application of multilevel modeling techniques than in previous studies using such models.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts

Fairbrother¹

2016

SocScience

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Third, political economy helps to pinpoint the "winners" and "losers" that the public administration theories identify, contextualizing policies in structures like trade and integrated value chains (Becker, 1983;Dolphin, Pollitt, & Newbery, 2016;Frankhauser, Gennaioli, & Murray, 2015;Grossman & Helpman, 1994, 2001Jenkins, 2014;Murphy, 2002;Posner, 1974Posner, , 2013Stigler, 1971). Pricing emissions may reduce a country's comparative advantage in emission-intensive or fossil fuel-related activities, especially if the jurisdiction is exposed to trade and competition with others that do not price carbon.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of the fossil fuel and emission‐intensive industries on the stringency of mitigation policies: Evidence from the OECD countries and Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa

Stevens

2019

Env Pol Gov

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article assesses the effects of different industrial sectors on the design of marketbased policies that mitigate climate change. It claims that the emission-intensive and fossil fuel industries, especially those exposed to trade, have a negative impact on the stringency of domestic market-based mitigation policies, namely, carbon taxes and Emission Trading Systems (ETS). To address endogeneity between industrial and policy outputs, the empirical analysis resorts to a nontraditional instrumental variable method constructing instruments with heteroskedastic errors in the data. With a dataset that covers 34 countries from 1990 to 2015, the analysis shows that there is a negative and statistically significant association between these industries and policy stringency, albeit in a differentiated way. Whereas the upstream fossil fuel industries have a negative relationship with carbon taxes, the power industry was only negatively associated with ETS. Emission-intensive manufacturers and the downstream fossil fuels industry have a negative effect on both policies. The design and practical applications of each policy explain the disparities; although ETS regulate larger emission-intensive installations such as power plants, carbon taxes tend to impose tariffs on activities that are not necessarily emission-intensive, such as oil extraction or specific fuels. The results, robust to different estimation methods, support that larger industrial outputs are significantly associated with less stringent mitigation policies.

show abstract

“…Markets and environmental protection are therefore not intrinsically antithetical. Not surprisingly, the left-right gradient in environmental attitudes varies cross-nationally, and there is little evidence of a correlation between the leaning of a country's governing party and its likelihood of enacting climate legislation (Arnold et al, 2016;Fairbrother, 2016a;Fankhauser, Gennaioli, & Collins, 2015;McCright, Dunlap, & Marquart-Pyatt, 2016). The extreme ideological divide on climate change in the United States is, in short, atypical.…”

Section: Hard Core Distrustersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental attitudes and the politics of distrust

Fairbrother

2017

Sociology Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article reviews recent studies showing that distrust lies at the heart of the serious crisis of sustainability that humanity is failing to address, insofar as distrust of environmental scientists, communicators, and policymakers are all undermining public demand for better public policies. Generalised distrust of scientists is rare, but political distrust is ubiquitous, such that even people who are concerned about environmental problems are often opposed to potential policy solutions. There are also people, however, who do not even believe in some of the problems—most notably climate change. This scepticism is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of their preferring free markets to regulation; in other ways, though, the sceptics are not at all sympathetic to free markets. What appears more distinctive about them is their distrust of virtually all elite social institutions, including communities of experts, and a corresponding divide between their beliefs and preferences and those of experts generally.

show abstract

The political economy of passing climate change legislation: Evidence from a survey

Cited by 158 publications

References 51 publications

Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts

Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts

The influence of the fossil fuel and emission‐intensive industries on the stringency of mitigation policies: Evidence from the OECD countries and Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa

Environmental attitudes and the politics of distrust

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About