The research project THERAPY examines how voters respond to environment, energy and climate policies ("environmental policies", for short). Anecdotal evidence, such as the Yellow vests and Nok er nok! movements in France and Norway, suggests that environmental 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 environmental policies that people are willing to accept. Identifying such policies may lead to accelerated environmental policy output and avoidance of unjust environmental policies.
We assume that citizens are dissatisfied with public policies if they vote against incumbent parties, and we assume that citizens are dissatisfied with the political system if they do not to vote. With these assumptions in mind, we analyze how environmental policies affect citizens’ satisfaction with public policy and the political system, with data describing the placement of environmental and energy infrastructure such as wind turbines and road tolls. Our analyses consider electoral participation and electoral results over several years, countries and political entities. Additionally, we will field surveys and perform qualitative interviews.
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 of our research project is that Danish voters also punish politicians that are responsible for development of wind power. Our analysis, however, shows that Danish voters only punish local politicians. The development of wind power did not affect support for political parties that were incumbent at the national level, which we think is surprising since national authorities are responsible for the legislation and financial instruments that stimulate wind power development in Denmark. Additionally, our results suggest that voters do not return to the party that they previously punished, and the effect is in that sense permanent.
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.
