Suchergebnisse

When do governments adopt ambitious climate policy? Charting the theoretical territory between climate change politics and long-term policymaking, this paper highlights the role of electoral competition in shaping how politicians respond to the intertemporal tradeoff of one important climate change mitigation policy: fossil fuel taxation. The more secure the government is in office, the more insulated it is from the vagaries of political competition, and the more likely it is to impose costs on constituents today to generate a future stable climate. By influencing governments' time preferences, competition structures the myopia of elected officials. I test the arguments using an original dataset of gasoline taxation across high-income democracies between 1988 and 2013. I find evidence that higher levels of electoral competition are associated with lower gasoline tax rates, and that the relationship is moderated by the level of costs imposed on voters, but not government partisanship. More generally, the analysis highlights when governments can increase consumer prices to address long-term challenges.

Many policy problems require taking costly action today for future benefits. Examining the case of climate change, this paper examines how two institutions—electoral rules and interest group intermediation—structure the distributional politics of climate change and as a result, drive variation in climate "policy investments" across the high-income democracies. Proportional electoral rules increase electoral safety, allowing politicians to impose short-term costs on voters. Concertation between industry and the state enables governments to compensate losers, defusing organized opposition to policy change. Moreover, the joint presence of both institutions generates complementarities that reinforce their independent effects, pushing countries onto different climate politics trajectories. Newly available data on climate policy stringency provide empirical support for the arguments. Countries with PR and interest group concertation have the highest levels of policy stringency and distribute higher costs toward consumers. The analysis points to causal mechanisms that should structure policy responses to a more general set of long-term challenges.

Abstract
The discussion on 'The comparative institutional analysis of energy transitions' gives us a state-of-the-art overview of the main theoretical and conceptual developments within the field of political economy. It invites us to broaden our knowledge on the changing realities of different geographical regions in energy transition. In this discussion forum, Finnegan discusses emerging themes in the comparative political economy literature of climate change. He identifies gaps and offers an outline for further research. Allen, Allen, Cumming and Johan take a closer look at the links between different types of capitalism and the natural environment. The authors stress the importance of adopting an institutional perspective to explain differences in environmental outcomes. Wood compares the transitions of energy usage and mixes between liberal and coordinated market economies from a historical perspective. He looks for parallels between the energy transition from coal to oil and gas to the current renewables. Nicklich and Endo answer the question 'Do globalization and globally perceived occurrences of environmental problems lead to a convergence of energy supply?'. They compare the fields of German and Japanese wind power with a particular focus on Greenpeace after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Finally, Lim and Tanaka focus on the question 'When do energy transition policies enjoy broad-based acceptance?'. They conclude that the public acceptance of energy transition varies between Western and non-Western societies.