The Electoral Ramifications of Environmental Policy

The research project THERAPY examines how voters respond to environment, energy, and climate policies. Anecdotal evidence, such as the Yellow vests and Nok er nok! movements in France and Norway, suggests that such policies can cause rifts between citizens and politicians. Meanwhile, the window of opportunity for avoiding dangerous climate change is closing, and it is therefore important to identify adaption and mitigation policies that people are willing to accept. The identification of such policies can contribute to more rapid, progressive and just decisions making. We assume that citizens are dissatisfied with public policies if they vote against incumbent parties or join protest parties or movements. We also we assume that citizens are dissatisfied with the political system if they do not to vote. With these assumptions in mind, we analyze how environment, energy and climate policies affect citizens’ satisfaction with public policy and the political system. The analyses are performed on data describing the placement of relevant infrastructure such as wind turbines and road tolls; electoral and protest data on individual and precinct levels; monthly polls of voting intentions; as well as surveys and interviews with political representatives. Some of the datasets cover many countries and years, whereas others are limited to selected countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, USA) and recent time. We expect that the distribution of costs and benefits through public policies affect voting, and that this effect varies between countries with different political systems. Earlier research shows that voters in Canada punished incumbent politicians that were responsible for development of wind power in their ‘backyards’. One of the preliminary results in our project is that Danish voters also punish politicians that are responsible for development of wind power. Our analysis, however, indicates that Danish voters only punish local politicians. The development of wind power seems to have had little effect on support for national-level incumbent parties, which we think is surprising since national authorities are responsible for the legislation and financial instruments that stimulate development of wind power in Denmark. Additionally, our results indicate that voters do not return to the party that they previously punished, which suggests that energy and climate policies have long-term impacts on electoral support. Another analysis in our project, which considers the anti-road toll party in Norway (‘Folkeaksjonen nei til mer bompenger’), suggests that protest parties have little impact on electoral participation. Two preliminary results, moreover, suggest that representatives in this party often come from other parties and they have similar demographic and socio-economic backgrounds as representatives in other parties. Our ongoing research examine similarities and differences between the manifestos that anti road-toll party and other parties have published. Through these efforts, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of how the emergence of protest parties affects representation in democratic systems. Three other results in our project are that (1) climate adaption, by way of preemptive power outages, has little effect on political attitudes in California; (2) pledged reduction in oil production has little effect on the intent to vote for the Norwegian Labor Party; and (3) pledges do not necessarily imply new politics since most members of the Powering Past Coal Alliance were already phasing out coal when they joined the alliance. Preliminary results, moreover, indicate that gas taxes have limited impact on support for incumbent parties in OECD countries, and that information campaigns with projected sea-level rise can make US citizens in areas with large flood-risk less concerned about climate change. Other ongoing research in the project examines political consequences of road tolls in Sweden, the visibility of wind turbines in Sweden, and climate rebates in Canada. Additionally, we are further developing and completing the preliminary analyses that we have outlined above.

The proposed project, THERAPY, analyzes how environmental legislation affects voting. Our overarching research problem is: to what extent do voters punish politicians for enacting environment- and climate policies? This question is pressing because politicians often seem to shy away from environmental legislation for fear of being punished disproportionally at the ballot box for short-term individual costs. THERAPY will contribute to finding out whether this fear is justified, and we expect to see more pro-active policymaking in the future if it turns out that most voters, under certain circumstances, are ready to accept specific environmental policies. We present a theoretical framework that predicts a variety of positive and negative electoral responses to policy decisions based on the concentration of implied costs and benefits, and the political-institutional context that policies are introduced within. To test the hypotheses, we will assemble large quantities of precinct-level register data of municipal and regional elections and placement of infrastructure for climate mitigation and environmental protection (e.g., wind turbines), including multiple countries and years. We will analyze the data using state of the art, design-based methods, such as synthetic case control- and regression discontinuity analyses. Our contribution to the literature and stakeholders is therefore identification of electorally acceptable and unacceptable policies for environmental protection and climate mitigation, with the highest possible levels of validity and reliability.