Article

How do Competing Interest Groups Influence Environmental Policy? The Case of Renewable Electricity in Industrialized Democracies, 1989–2007

December 2013
Political Studies 61(4)

DOI:10.1111/1467-9248.12006

Authors:

Andrew Cheon

Johns Hopkins University

Johannes Urpelainen

Johns Hopkins University

In this article, we examine the effect of competing interest groups on environmental policy. We argue that the supporters of environmental policy should be the most influential in the absence of opposition, while the opposition's importance is maximized when the supporter coalition is strong. This highlights an important asymmetry between competing interest groups: supporters are decisive in the absence of opposition, while the opposition is only relevant if the supporters are already strong. We test the argument against data on renewable electricity generation in nineteen OECD countries, 1989–2007. Heavy industries have particularly strong incentives to oppose policies that support renewables, because heavy industries’ profitability depends on inexpensive electricity. We find that the supporter coalition has a positive effect on the growth of renewable electricity generation, but the positive effect diminishes with the strength of manufacturing. Moreover, heavy industry has a negative effect on the growth of renewable electricity generation and this effect increases with the strength of the supporter coalition.

Does climate advocacy matter? The importance of competing interest groups for national climate policies

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2022
CLIM POLICY

Climate politics and governance across the globe involve an increasing number of interest groups such as from business and civil society. Against this backdrop, it matters a great deal whether interest group mobilization is able to influence climate policy-making. First, there is an increasing number of climate policy supporters like nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and green businesses lobbying in favour of additional climate policies. Second, there is also strong mobilization of groups from energy-intensive and fossil fuel industries lobbying against potentially costly climate policies. In this paper, we investigate the potential effects of these mobilization patterns. More precisely, we ask whether there is any systematic effect of competing interest group mobilization on national climate policy production. To this end, we harness arguments from literatures on interest group mobilization and climate policy-making. Empirically, we exploit a comprehensive global dataset on the adoption of national climate laws and interest group mobilization (over 4,000 organizations) between 1997 and 2016. The results show that the increasing mobilization of climate policy supporters is positively related to national climate policy production. Climate policy opponents are able to weaken this effect, but are hardly able to block new climate laws. The results add to our understanding of climate politics focusing on the role of business organizations and NGOs. This is highly policy relevant for both analysts and practitioners given that the Paris Agreement relies heavily on national policy efforts. Key policy insights • The growing mobilization of climate policy supporters is positively related to the adoption of additional climate laws. • The positive effect of climate policy supporters is weakened but rarely blocked by climate policy opponents, such as those from the fossil fuel industry. • The effect of lobbying over climate policy needs to be assessed in its competitive context, that is by considering how political support and opposition on climate policy interact.

Low carbon for the long term: essays on the comparative political economy of climate change policy

Thesis

Nov 2019

Jared Finnegan

Long-term policy challenges – biodiversity loss, education and skills, infrastructure, and public debt – are everywhere, yet scholars are just beginning to examine their distinct political economy. In the context of these types of issues, politics is not only about who gets what, but who gets what and when. Climate change is the quintessential long-term policy problem. Why have some advanced capitalist democracies been more successful than others at addressing long-term problems like climate change? Surprisingly, political science has provided few answers to this substantively important question. This thesis tackles this question by focusing on the distributional politics of climate policy investment. It provides new arguments for how institutions and electoral incentives generate opportunities for governments to arrive at successful distributive bargains that impose short-term costs on social actors today for benefits that arrive in the future. Across countries, I show how electoral rules and interest group intermediation systematically structure the conditions needed for politicians to make long-term climate policy investments. Indeed, the complementarity between these institutions generate varieties of decarbonization, which push countries onto diverging policy trajectories. Building on these arguments, I look within countries over time and provide the first theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that links electoral competition to fossil fuel taxation. By influencing political risk, competition structures political incentives for imposing short-term costs on voters today for long-term benefits. It is only governments with a comfortable lead over rivals that can think past the next election to society’s long-run aggregate welfare. I find support for my arguments using new cross-national data on shadow carbon prices, original datasets of historical gasoline taxation across high-income democracies and US states, and a case study of fossil fuel tax policy decisions by the German Social Democratic-Green coalition government. Beyond shedding light on the politics of long-term policymaking in the case of climate change, the thesis points to crucial mechanisms that plausibly account for the differential ability of governments to tackle a wider range of long-term challenges.

Empirical determinants of renewable energy deployment: A systematic literature review

Article

Jan 2020
ENERG ECON

Clémence Bourcet

A large share of greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the energy sector. Renewable energy (RE) appears to be a mean to decarbonize economies. To fight global warming, which might have substantial impacts on ecosystems and economies, it is essential to understand the empirical determinants of RE deployment for public policy guidance and to foster future research. This paper aims to review the growing, though limited, body of literature that has emerged in the late 2000's to study the quantitative determinants of RE development at a country level. Results show that there is little consensus on the influence of the economic, environmental, and energy-related determinants predominantly studied. The other main determinants considered are regulatory, political, and demographic. Results are often tempered by the fact that authors use diverse measures of RE deployment and have a variety of frameworks. This paper ends with several recommendations to improve the comparability of future papers to enhance their potential to make credible public policy recommendations. More specifically, the recommendations concern the choice of a RE deployment indicator, the determinants considered for further exploration, and the methodologies adopted.

Campaign Contributions as Crime: The Case of Contribution Influence on US Economic and Environmental Policy

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Although the current campaign finance system in the US allows private donations to campaigns, an increasing body of evidence suggests that these contributions influence policy and could potentially lead to social injury. This leads to an important question: Do campaign contributions constitute crime? The present article takes up this question. After an overview of the famous debate between Tappan and Sutherland on the role of social injury in determining whether something is a crime—and a concise summary of different types of political crime (e.g. corruption, bribery, state crime, and state-corporate crime)—an analysis is conducted to assess the connection, if any, between campaign contributions and two types of social injury: economic harm/inequality and environmental harm. Findings from the analysis show that campaign contributions can, indeed, cause social injury. It is therefore concluded that campaign contributions sometimes constitute crime under Sutherland’s framework. Numerous campaign finance reform options are discussed—all with the intent of limiting the social injury created by campaign contributions.

When does the structural power of business fade? assessing business privileged access at global climate negotiations

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022

Marcel Hanegraaff

Which non-state actors gain privileged access to policymakers during global environmental negotiations? This paper offers a first systematic answer to this question. I argue that, overall, business non-state actors gain more access to policymakers compared to NGOs. Importantly however, the privileged position of business groups becomes less pronounced – sometimes even disappears – if countries are more developed, less reliant on fossil fuels, more democratic, or the impact of climate change is higher for a country. For the empirical analysis, I first analyzed all business groups and NGOs that participated in country delegations at UN climate conferences between 1997 and 2012 (n = 3,734). To evaluate privileged access, I compare actors which gained access to country delegations (n = 804) with the organizations that participated during the conferences as observers (n = 2,930). The results confirm that business has more privileged access in general but not in all countries.

Institutions, Climate Change, and the Foundations of Long-Term Policymaking

Article

Jan 2022
COMP POLIT STUD

Jared Finnegan

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.

Institutions, Climate Change, and the Foundations of Long-term Policymaking

Preprint

Nov 2021

Jared Finnegan

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 distributional politics, 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 provides 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 responses to a more general set of long-term challenges.

The politics of technological change - case studies from the energy sector

Thesis

Full-text available

Aug 2020

Nicolas Schmid

Technological change, i.e. the invention, innovation and diffusion of new technologies, is a key driver of economic development and societal progress. There is widespread agreement that, historically, energy technologies have been at the core of most technological revolutions. Yet, the transition to and diffusion of fossil fuel-based energy technologies has come at high societal and ecological costs, most notably climate change. A fast and deep transition to low carbon technologies – particularly renewable energy and efficiency technologies – is the main lever to address climate change. While deployment of these technologies has grown significantly over the last decades – largely policy-induced – this transition needs to be further accelerated and deepened through public policies. In light of various trade-offs and competing policy goals, implementing and designing these policies is an intrinsically political endeavor. A growing body of literature at the intersection of public policy, political science, and innovation studies covers these aspects of energy politics. Yet, energy politics not only influence technological change through public policy – technological change can also, in turn, influence politics. A better understanding of this inverse effect of technological change on politics is necessary to formulate politically feasible and effective energy policy. While a nascent body of literature deals with these aspects in the context of the transition to renewable energy and efficiency technologies, how exactly such low-carbon technological change affects what aspects of politics still remains a black box. In an exploratory approach, this dissertation attempts to address this research gap with the following overarching question: How does low-carbon technological change affect energy politics? To answer this question, this cumulative dissertation is built on a heuristic framework: On an abstract level, it argues that technological change can affect politics through both its expanding and (re)distributional capacity. It further proposes that politics can be disaggregated into the categories of interests, ideas, and institutions, on the level of both elite and mass politics. The individual papers in this dissertation cover various elements of this heuristic framework and leverage a plurality of qualitative and quantitative methods, and individual case studies. Focusing on how technological change affects the interests and ideas of elite politics, Paper 1 examines how the transition to renewable energy technologies influenced the composition and strength of advocacy coalitions in the German energy sector. The main contribution of this paper is to substantiate the mechanisms through which policy-induced technological change affects coalitions, and to link these mechanisms to patterns of actor movements underlying coalition change. Paper 2 also focuses on aspects of ideas in elite politics and touches upon institutions as moderating factor. It examines how technological change drives regulators’ perceived feasibility of more stringent public and private regulation of energy efficiency technologies in the Swiss building sector. The contribution of this paper is to highlight that the interaction among public and private regulation can run through the mechanism of technological change. Also focusing on ideas and institutions in elite politics, paper 3 examines how technological change affects the positions of political parties on energy technologies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The paper shows that technological change is a driver of party positions and their salience, and that this effect is mediated by party and party system characteristics. Finally, paper 4 examines interests in mass politics by focusing on how the decline in coal mining affects voting behavior in presidential elections in the United States. The paper shows that also decline in technologies can result in political effects, in this case resistance in form of voting in favor of pro-coal candidates. Based on a mixed methods approach and systematic data collection, these four papers give novel empirical insights into how technological change affects interests, ideas, and institutions in elite and mass energy politics. Based on these insights, the papers engage in theory-building. Notably, the dissertation provides a framework in which energy politics is described as a dynamic feedback loop of public policy, technological change, and politics. Further, the dissertation substantiates various mechanisms that link technological change to politics, and analyzes the effects of technological change on a variety of relevant political actors. Doing so, it contributes to current academic debates in public policy, political science, and innovation studies on energy politics. Further, this dissertation also has policy implications: Policymakers’ focus should be on the expanding and (re)distributional effects of technological change on energy and climate politics. More sensibility to the locus and nature of these political struggles could enable effective forward-looking policy strategies that sow the seeds today for broader political support tomorrow. Finally, future research should aim at testing the theory built in this dissertation with more quantitative research methods. Future research should also build on this exploratory dissertation by expanding the empirical scope to other low-carbon technologies, and expand the policy feedback logic to other policy outcomes such as nature-based solutions and behavioral change.

Supply Chain Linkages and the Extended Carbon Coalition

Article

Full-text available

May 2020
AM J POLIT SCI

Which firms oppose action to fight climate change? Networks of input sourcing and sales to downstream customers ought to propagate and reinforce opposition to decarbonization beyond direct emitters of CO2. To test this claim, we build the largest data set of public political activity for and against climate action in the United States, revealing that the majority of corporate opposition to climate action comes from outside the highest‐emitting industries. We construct new measures of the carbon intensity of firms and show that policy exposure via carbon‐intensive inputs and sales to downstream emitters explains this large volume of opposition from non‐emitting industries. Sixty‐six percent of U.S. lobbying on climate policy has been conducted by an extended coalition of firms, associations, and other groups that have publicly opposed reducing carbon emissions. Public opposition to climate action by carbon‐connected industries is therefore broad‐based, highly organized, and matched with extensive lobbying.

Elections and Policy Responsiveness: Evidence from Environmental Voting in the U.S. Congress: Elections and Policy Responsiveness

Article

Jan 2020

Do elections affect legislators' voting patterns? We investigate this question in the context of environmental policy in the U.S. Congress. We theorize that since the general public is generally in favor of legislation protecting the environment, legislators have an incentive to favor the public over industry and vote for pro‐environment legislation at election time. The argument is supported by analyses of data on environmental roll call votes for the U.S. Congress from 1970 to 2013 where we estimate the likelihood of casting a pro‐environment vote as a function of the time to an election. While Democrats are generally more likely to cast a pro‐environment vote before an election, this effect is much stronger for Republicans when the legislator won the previous election by a thinner margin. The election effect is maximized for candidates receiving substantial campaign contributions from the (anti‐environment) oil and gas industry. Analysis of Twitter data confirms that Congressmembers make pro‐environmental statements and highlight their roll call voting behavior during the election season. These results show that legislators do strategically adjust their voting behavior to favor the public immediate prior to an election.

Historical diffusion of nuclear, wind and solar power in different national contexts: implications for climate mitigation pathways

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023
ENVIRON RES LETT

Climate change mitigation requires rapid expansion of low-carbon electricity but there is a disagreement on whether available technologies such as renewables and nuclear power can be scaled up sufficiently fast. Here we analyse the diffusion of nuclear (from the 1960s), as well as wind and solar (from the 1980-90s) power at the national level. We show that all these technologies have been adopted in most large economies except major energy exporters, but solar and wind diffused across countries faster and wider than nuclear. After the initial adoption, the maximum annual growth for nuclear power has been 2.6% of total electricity supply (IQR 1.3%-6%), for wind – 1.1% (0.6%-1.7%), and for solar – 0.8% (0.5%-1.3%). The fastest growth of nuclear power occurred in Western Europe in the 1980s, a response by industrialised democracies to the energy supply crises of the 1970s. The European Union, currently experiencing a similar energy supply shock, is planning to expand wind and solar at similarly high rates. This illustrates that national contexts can impact the speed of technology diffusion at least as much as technology characteristics like cost, granularity, and complexity. In the IPCC climate change mitigation pathways, renewables grow much faster than nuclear due to their lower projected costs, though empirical evidence does not show that the cost is the sole factor determining the speed of diffusion. We demonstrate that expanding low-carbon electricity in line with the 1.5°C target in Asia requires some growth of nuclear power even if renewables increase similarly to the most ambitious European Union’s plans, and that 2°C-consistent pathways in Asia are compatible with replicating China’s nuclear power plans to the whole region, while also replicating the projected near-term growth of renewables in the EU. Our analysis demonstrates the usefulness of empirically-benchmarked feasibility spaces for context-sensitive future technology projections.

The influence of visions on cooperation among interest organizations in fragmented socio‐technical systems

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023

The paper shows that visions of the future can be used as a predictor of cooperation and division between actors in their efforts to shape the institutional environment, specifically policy in socio‐technical systems. Accordingly, the paper suggests a new method to analyze visions: a virtual solution space in which visions can be grouped according to their similarity. The similarity of visions is calculated based on cluster analysis. Empirically, the paper focuses on the networks between industry associations in the heating transition in the German building sector. It shows that actors whose visions of future socio‐technical system developments overlap are more likely to cooperate with each other. It also suggests that the fragmentation of the residential heating system in Germany is reflected in a fragmented actor network. Furthermore, the authors show that shared technological interests can outweigh similar visions. These fragmented technological interests hinder meaningful cooperation. This is potentially one reason why a powerful low‐carbon heating coalition in Germany that could facilitate an accelerated deployment of low‐carbon heat systems by driving policy change has not emerged to date. The paper contributes to a better understanding of how niche actors in sustainability transitions use their agency and specifically strategize to bring about institutional change. In this respect, the authors discuss how differing levels of system‐fragmentation influence transition dynamics in general and institutional change dynamics in particular.

Beyond intergovernmental cooperation: domestic politics of transboundary air pollution in Korea and Singapore

Article

Full-text available

May 2023

Annie Young Song

This study explores why the implementation of domestic environmental policies that tackle transboundary air pollution has been undermined by comparing the cases of the Republic of Korea (Korea) and Singapore. Heavy smog recurs in Korea and Singapore every year despite various attempts to reduce air pollution through the signing of environmental cooperation agreements and the introduction of domestic measures. While existing scholarship has examined intergovernmental cooperation aimed at mitigating transboundary air pollution, this study focuses on domestic factors affecting policy implementation processes at the national level. How do domestic factors shape governmental policy actions within environmental cooperation agreements in the cases of Korea and Singapore? I employed a process-tracing method to analyze the entanglement of domestic stakeholders from the late 1990s to 2019. By drawing upon domestic politics theory, I find that domestic dynamics, intricately linked to other stakeholders, have limited the effectiveness of policies implemented to address poor air quality. This finding suggests that domestic politics play a critical role in establishing effective regional environmental cooperation in the long run.

Green finance and renewable energy: A worldwide evidence

Article

Feb 2023
ENERG ECON

Using a large sample of 44 countries for 2007‒2020, we provide evidence that green finance (green bonds) significantly fosters renewable energy production. Our results are robust to addressing cross-sectional dependence concerns, allowing structural breaks, and using several alternative specifications and estimation methods. Compared to our baseline findings, the effect is higher for green bonds issued to finance alternative energy. We also find that the existing stock of technological capacity significantly fosters the impact of green finance on renewable energy production, particularly in the long run. The long-run impact of green finance is significant in countries with higher emissions per dollar GDP, higher levels of climate change exposure to the economy and human life, and better-developed credit markets. The effect is more pronounced in countries with low or net zero emission targets and following the post-Paris 2015 agreements.

Across the Boards: Explaining Firm Support for Climate Policy

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

When do corporations stop ignoring or opposing climate action and start to go green? We focus on the role of corporate boards of directors, which shape firms' positions on internal and external issues of corporate governance and public policy. We argue that board decisions to engage constructively on climate issues are likely to be influenced by the choices and experiences of other firms. Learning, socialization, and competitive dynamics are especially important in highly salient and rapidly evolving policy areas, such as climate change. To test this theory, we construct the network of board memberships for US public corporations and uncover robust evidence that climate innovations diffuse among companies that share board members in common and among companies whose board members interact at separate boards. Understanding the unfolding dynamics of corporate climate action requires examining corporate boards and their social context.

Interest Pressures and Carbon Taxation: Evidence from Vietnam

Preprint

Full-text available

Jul 2022

Kasper Vrolijk

Many economies implement carbon taxation to reduce emissions, but some groups may influence government to change policy in their favor. How influential are these interest pressures? This paper proposes a new methodology to measure interest pressures, merging insights from preference, expenditure, lobbying cost, and corruption data with newly collected data on public and private pressures from Vietnam. I show that interest pressures can largely account for observed changes in carbon taxation and that government adopted inefficient carbon taxation as a result of those pressures. The findings highlight the necessity for efficient representative institutions, which allows firms (through associations) and households (residential groups) to lobby government and receive information about the policy. Results also submit that absent lobbying regulation, firms and other interest groups resort to informal linkages to influence government, suggesting the essence of improving regulation to promote transparency and equity in lobbying among interest groups. Lastly, results suggest that policy inter-dependencies matter and that governments may implement carbon taxation inefficiently if it cannot sufficiently address economic constraints resulting from other policies.

Explaining the energy mix in China's electricity projects under the belt and road initiative

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2022

This paper explains the energy mix of China's overseas electricity investments across Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) recipient countries. We focus on Indonesia and Pakistan. Our research is based on both newly gathered project-level data and in-depth interviews with stakeholders of Chinese-backed power plants in Indonesia and Pakistan. We examine (1) why Chinese actors are involved in renewable power generation in Pakistan and not in Indonesia, and (2) why Chinese-backed coal-fired projects in Pakistan are cleaner than in Indonesia. We argue that variations along the three dimensions-scope, governance regime, and issue linkage-lead to different energy mixes in Chinese-invested power plants across BRI countries. This framework specifies how supply and demand factors interact across multiple levels regarding the formulation and implementation of China's overseas electricity projects. Our findings shed new light on the environmental implications of BRI projects and the dynamics of renewable energy development in emerging markets.

The distribution of conflict and attention across energy infrastructure

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2022
PUBLIC ADMIN

Across the world, public administration and policy decisions are related to diverse levels of conflict and attention. However, the degree and variance of conflict and attention remain largely unspecified. This article examines how types of energy infrastructure and characteristics of project location are associated with the distribution of conflict and attention around the energy infrastructure siting process. Our empirical focus is on gas pipelines, electricity transmission lines, solar power projects, and wind power projects across the United States in 2018. Primarily relying on regression analysis and interviews, this article finds differences in the distribution of conflict and attention intensity within and between these energy infrastructure types, with gas pipelines and wind power projects presenting relatively higher conflict and attention intensities. However, conflict and attention are skewed to low intensities across infrastructure types. Characteristics of project locations that are positively associated with high conflict and attention intensity include the proportion of Democratic voters and the level of urbanization in the places where projects are sited. In contrast, the proportion of Black or Hispanic residents is negatively associated with high conflict and attention intensity. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The impossible energy trinity: Energy security, sustainability, and sovereignty in cross-border electricity systems

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2022
POLIT GEOGR

The article explores energy policy tradeoffs faced by states that expand renewable electricity production and are part of cross-border electricity systems. We develop the concept of an impossible energy trinity (IET), which posits that many states cannot simultaneously achieve energy security, sustainability, and sovereignty. We argue that these states have three options to cope with the challenge of intermittent electricity production from domestic renewables. The dirty option resorts to base or reserve electric generating capacity from non-sustainable sources. The insecure option accepts system stability risks and/or higher electricity prices. The non-autonomous option cedes control over domestic energy rules to pursue integration with neighboring electricity grids and markets. We empirically illustrate our novel concept using the case of Switzerland, which finds itself at the crossroads of the three options. The country has to choose whether to add conventional generation capacities, accept grid instabilities and higher electricity prices, or integrate with the EU electricity market and rules. We discuss generalizations to other countries and ways to manage the IET. We conclude that public pressure for decarbonization and economic pressure to maintain secure energy supply render the non-autonomous option most likely in many states. The operation and governance of transboundary grid structure thereby influence energy transitions on national and subnational scales.

The Design of the Swiss Feed-In Tariff: Policy Transfer and Accommodation

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2022

In light of climate change mitigation and the transformation of the energy sector, many jurisdictions have adopted deployment policies for renewable energy (RE) technologies. Several RE deployment policy instruments have diffused from frontrunner countries to other jurisdictions. Switzerland implemented its first comprehensive RE support policy with the adoption of a cost-covering and technology-specific feed-in tariff in 2009, following Germany’s example. Yet, policy designs look very different in the two countries and, importantly, also result in different policy outcomes. In this chapter, we examine the reasons for these policy design differences. We unpack the design of the Swiss feed-in tariff and analyze which of the policy’s elements were directly adopted from Germany and which were accommodated to the Swiss context and why. In particular, we compare the specific instrument designs for two renewable power generation technologies, solar photovoltaics (PV) and biomass, and study the role of technology-related actors in shaping these policy designs. We draw from the policy diffusion and policy transfer literatures and offer important extensions to the literature by showing that, instead of entire policies, it is possible that only certain design elements of a policy diffuse from one jurisdiction to another. Additionally, we find that the composition of the existing technology-related actor bases in the donor and recipient countries is important in determining whether the accommodation of the design elements to the domestic context occurs.

Revisiting the determinants of renewable energy investment - New evidence from political and government ideology

Article

Apr 2021
ENERG POLICY

This study examines the determinants of renewable energy investment, focusing on government orientation, nature of government system and government policy. Considering three possible ideologies of the ruling party including left, right and centre and two possible natures of the government system including presidential and parliamentary system, this research employs a panel data of 60 countries. This research is the first to examine the effect of nature of government system on renewable energy investment, using a sample from both developed and non-developed countries. The results confirm that both the left and central-orientated ruling party promote renewable energy investment more than a right-orientated government. Although the presidential system has greater ability to enact environmental policies quicker, the result suggests that the parliamentarian system has a better effect on promoting renewable energy investment. In an interesting result, the study finds that developed countries do not consider renewables to be an alternative to the conventional method of electricity production. In this case, developed countries are committed to the growth in renewable because they find investment in these renewables essential for the environment. Finally, the study establishes that the effectiveness of government support policies depend on the type of technology or the sub-group.

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

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2021

Kai Schulze

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.

Beliefs About Consequences from Climate Action Under Weak Climate Institutions: Sectors, Home Bias, and International Embeddedness

Article

Nov 2020

Climate policy has distributional effects, and ratcheting up climate ambition will only become politically feasible if the general public believes that their country can win from ambitious climate action. In this article, we develop a theory of belief formation that anchors distributional effects from climate action at the sector level. Specifically, we study how knowing about these impacts shapes public beliefs about collective economic consequences from climate policy—not only in a home country but also abroad. A nationally representative survey experiment in the United Kingdom demonstrates that respondents are biased toward their home country in assessing information about winning and losing sectors: while beliefs brighten for good news and worsen for bad news when the home country is involved, distributional effects from abroad are discounted for belief formation. We also show that feelings of “international embeddedness,” akin to globalization attitudes, make UK respondents consistently hold more positive beliefs that the country can benefit from ambitious climate action. Ruling out several alternative explanations, these results offer a first step toward a better understanding of how distributional effects in one issue area, such as globalization, can spill over to other issue areas, such as climate change.

Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change

Article

Nov 2020

Climate change policy is generally modeled as a global collective action problem structured by free-riding concerns. Drawing on quantitative data, archival work, and elite interviews, we review empirical support for this model and find that the evidence for its claims is weak relative to the theory’s pervasive influence. We find, first, that the strongest collective action claims appear empirically unsubstantiated in many important climate politics cases. Second, collective action claims—whether in their strongest or in more nuanced versions—appear observationally equivalent to alternative theories focused on distributive conflict within countries. We argue that extant patterns of climate policy making can be explained without invoking free-riding. Governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do, and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not. Without an empirically grounded model for global climate policy making, institutional and political responses to climate change may ineffectively target the wrong policy-making dilemma. We urge scholars to redouble their efforts to analyze the empirical linkages between domestic and international factors shaping climate policy making in an effort to empirically ground theories of global climate politics. Such analysis is, in turn, the topic of this issue’s special section.

State Policy and Lobbying in a Federal System: Evidence from the Production Tax Credit for Renewable Energy, 1998–2012

Article

May 2020

State policies shape firms’ incentives to lobby in the United States, but the existing lobbying literature mostly ignores these incentives. Using lobbying records for all electric utilities in the United States from 1998 to 2012, we examine how state policies affect federal lobbying by both proponents and opponents of federal support for the renewable energy policy. Our theory predicts that supportive state policies reduce the returns to lobbying by both proponents and opponents. Empirically, we show that when the federal production tax credit for renewable energy is about to expire, electric utilities from states without renewable portfolio standards become more likely to lobby than those from states with these policies. Because the timing of the expiration of the production tax credit is quasi-random, these findings carry a causal interpretation. Using text analysis techniques, we also show that the lobbying efforts are focused on energy and environmental issues while lobbying on unrelated topics remains unaffected.

Exploring the Enabling Environments, Inherent Characteristics and Intrinsic Motivations Fostering Global Electricity Decarbonization

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2019

The need for transitioning towards low-carbon energy systems, and the recent boom in available data, allows for a constant re-evaluation of global electricity sector decarbonization progress, and its underlying theoretical assumptions. Arguably, the existing decarbonization literature and institutional support frameworks focus on top-down supply side mechanisms, where policies, goals, access to financing, and technology innovation are suggested as the main drivers. Here, we synthesize eleven global datasets that range from electricity dec-arbonization progress, to quality of governance, to international fossil fuel subsidies, and environmental policies, amongst several others, and use methods from data mining to explore the factors that may be fostering or hindering decarbonization progress. This exercise allows us to present numerous hypotheses worth exploring in future research. Some of these hypotheses suggest that policies might be ineffective when misaligned with country specific motivators and inherent characteristics, that even in the absence of policy there are particular inherent characteristics that foster decarbonization progress (e.g., relatively high local energy prices, foreign energy import dependency and the absence of a large extractive resource base), and that the interaction of country-specific enabling environments, inherent characteristics, and motivations is what determines dec-arbonization progress, rather than stand-alone support mechanisms. We present the hypothesis that existing support mechanisms for decarbonization may be relying too much on blanket strategies (e.g., policies, targets), and that there is a need for support mechanisms that encompass a wider diversity of country-specific underlying conditions.

Financial investment for the development of renewable energy capacity

Article

Nov 2019
Energ Environ

Taedong Lee

While the renewable energy sector, in general, is increasingly gaining ground with regard to energy mix, the electricity generation capacity from renewable energy sources varies from country to country. This study aims to examine the driving factors and the obstacles that explain the variation in the renewable energy generation capacities. A panel data analysis of the World’s leading economies (18 countries out of G-20 countries) from 2009 to 2013 assesses the association between installed renewable energy generation capacity and its drivers. The findings of this study suggest that financial investment from public and private sector is crucial to enhancing renewable energy generation capacity in leading economies. In addition to regulation and economic incentive policies, policies that ensure financial investment such as investment risk reduction measures can facilitate renewable energy capacity growth.

A conceptual framework for elucidating how agency shapes destabilization of socio-technical systems

Conference Paper

Jun 2019

A timely transition to low-carbon socio-technical systems such as energy and transport is crucial in combating climate change and reducing the environmental and health impacts of human activities. While innovation policies have gained wide acclaim for driving technological change, the importance of destabilization policies for disrupting incumbent technologies such as fossil fuel-based electricity or mobility systems have been largely overlooked. Although destabilization measures such as phase-out policies can be highly effective, their enactment is challenging, as it is contingent upon the politics and power relations among the actors. Destabilization policies can be viewed as an act of disrupting institutions which is likely to be contested by incumbents who have stake in defending the existing institutional configurations. Therefore, it is crucial to unravel the interests and agency of key actors to understand why institutional changes for destabilizing socio-technical regimes can be realized in some cases but not in others. In this study, we present a conceptual framework that conceives actors' capability of changing institutional structures to be dependent on their varying practices and resource endowments. This framework enables systematic empirical analyses to understand how agency account for the change of institutions such as the adoption of destabilization policies. By offering testable propositions we strive to contribute to the theory-building in micro-foundations of institutions.

The social cost of lobbying over climate policy

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2019
Nat. Clim. Change.

Domestic political processes shape climate policy. In particular, there is increasing concern about the role of political lobbying over climate policy. This paper examines how lobbying spending on the Waxman–Markey bill, the most prominent and promising United States climate regulation so far, altered its likelihood of being implemented. We combine data from comprehensive United States lobbying records with an empirical method for forecasting the policy’s effect on the value of publicly listed firms. Our statistical analysis suggests that lobbying by firms expecting losses from the policy was more effective than lobbying by firms expecting gains. Interpreting this finding through a game-theoretic model, we calculate that lobbying lowered the probability of enacting the Waxman–Markey bill by 13 percentage points, representing an expected social cost of US$60 billion (in 2018 US dollars). Our findings also suggest how future climate policy proposals can be designed to be more robust to political opposition.

Environmental Homogenization or Heterogenization? The Effects of Globalization on Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1970–2014

Article

Full-text available

May 2019

Globalization significantly influences climate change. Ecological modernization theory and world polity theory suggest that globalization reduces carbon dioxide emissions worldwide by facilitating economic, political, social, and cultural homogenization, whereas ecological unequal exchange theory indicates that cumulative economic and political disparities lead to an uneven distribution of emissions in developed and less developed countries. This study addresses this controversy and systematically investigates the extent to which different dimensions of globalization influence carbon emissions in developed and less developed countries by treating globalization as a dynamic historical process involving economic, political, and social/cultural dimensions in a long-term, cross-national context. Drawing on data for 137 countries from 1970 to 2014, we find that while globalization, social and cultural globalization in particular, has enabled developed countries to significantly decrease their carbon emissions, it has led to more emissions in less developed countries, lending support to the ecological unequal exchange theory. Consistent with world polity theory, international political integration has contributed to carbon reductions over time. We highlight the internal tension between environmental conservation and degradation in a globalizing world and discuss the opportunities for less developed countries to reduce emissions.

Politics or management? Analysing differences in local implementation performance of the EU Ambient Air Quality directive

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2019

As far as local governments are responsible for the practical implementation of many European Union (EU) policies, they codetermine member states’ EU compliance records and the fate of EU legislation. Yet, they do so in remarkably different ways, as exemplified by the variegated implementation of the Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC by Dutch municipalities. Taking guidance from the literature on EU compliance, in this article we explain the differences in local implementation performance based on the political and managerial approaches. Understanding which of the two approaches drives different local responses to EU policy bears consequences for the appropriate remedy for nonimplementation. Four municipalities were purposefully selected along with the two-by-two implementation performance scoring matrix in the realm of air quality. A comparative within-case analysis specifies how political explanations outweigh managerial explanations in accounting for variation in implementation performance and distils ‘policy saliency’ as the driving causal mechanism.

What Political Settings Promote Renewable Energy Investments by Energy Utilities?—A Qualitative Comparative Analysis in Swiss Cantons

Article

Jan 2019

Investment decisions by power utilities significantly shape sustainable energy systems. While it is known that different political factors influence investment decisions, the interaction of these factors remains unclear. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis of 22 cases in 19 Swiss cantons, this study analyses which combinations of political conditions promote investment decisions by utilities in renewable energies. The analysis reveals the significance of different combinations of political conditions. High investments in renewable energies can be explained above all by political settings in which high administrative capacity is linked to ambitious policy goals, to the considerable power of a parliamentary pro‐ecology coalition or to non‐privatized utilities. The results support other findings on the importance of complex governance settings with hierarchical elements. They raise further questions about the precise mechanisms that mediate between political conditions and investment decisions of energy utilities, and the role of public administrations in this respect.

Energy Politics and Climate Change - preprint chapter for Oxford Handbook on Politics of Energy

Preprint

Full-text available

Oct 2019

Llewelyn Hughes

Social science has a crucial role to play in informing policymakers about political and institutional strategies conducive to implementing more ambitious energy-related climate change policies. In this chapter I review major avenues of research in political science and related disciplines that examine the politics of energy and climate change. I focus on how individuals, civil society, business, and governments, affect climate-related energy policies. In the second section of the chapter I suggest three issues with the potential to promote more rapid decarbonization of energy systems, but which have not been a sustained focus of research to date: 1) the politics of low-carbon economic development; 2) innovation and the deployment of new technologies; 3) the politics of negative emissions and geoengineering technologies.

Citizens United and State environmental policy, regulations, and outcomes

Article

Jun 2023

Micah Farver

Umwelt- und Energiepolitik

Chapter

Mar 2023

Jale Tosun

Stranded Assets: Research Gaps and Implications for Climate Policy

Article

Mar 2023

Geopolitical Risks, Oil Market Instability and Renewable Energy Production

Article

Jan 2021

Umwelt- und Energiepolitik

Chapter

Jul 2022

Jale Tosun

How Do Right-Wing Populist Parties Influence Climate and Renewable Energy Policies? Evidence from OECD Countries

Article

Apr 2022

There is increasing evidence that right-wing populist parties (RWPPs) and their supporters are hostile to climate and low-carbon energy policies. In this article, we provide a quantitative analysis of the effects of RWPP representation in the legislature and executive on climate and renewable energy policy for a number of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the period 2007–2018. After controlling for other political, economic, and environmental factors, we find evidence for a significant and large negative effect of RWPPs in power on climate policy. Importantly, we also show that these negative effects vary with the proportionality of the electoral system and European Union membership. Both of these factors significantly moderate the negative influence of RWPPs. In countries with majoritarian electoral systems, the effects of RWPPs on climate policy work through both indirect legislative and direct executive routes. In contrast to climate policy, there is no overall significant relationship with renewable policy.

Swiss Energy Governance: Political, Economic and Legal Challenges and Opportunities in the Energy Transition

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2022

This open access book gathers the results of an interdisciplinary research project led by the Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER CREST) and jointly implemented by several universities. It identifies political, economic and legal challenges and opportunities in the energy transition from a governance perspective by exploring a variety of tools that allow state, non-state and transnational actors to manage the transition of the energy industry toward less fossil-fuel reliance. When analyzing the roles of these actors, the authors examine not only formal procedures such as political and democratic processes, but also market behavior and societal practices. In other words, the handbook focuses on both the behavior and the positive and normative frameworks of political actors, bureaucracies, courts, international organizations, lobby groups, civil society, economic actors and individuals. The authors subsequently use their findings to formulate specific guidelines for lawmakers and other rule-makers, as well as private and public actors. To do so, they draw on approaches stemming from the legal, political and management sciences.

Exploring advocacy coalitions for energy efficiency: Policy change through internal shock and learning in the European Union

Article

Oct 2021

Fredrik von Malmborg

This empirical study analyses policy change in the area of European Union energy efficiency policy by applying the advocacy coalition framework (ACF). The energy efficiency directive (EED) and its provisions on individual metering and billing (IMB) is used as a case study. IMB provisions have rendered substantial debate for almost a decade and the provisions were amended following successful advocacy work of the coalition opposing IMB. The study confirms recent developments of the ACF theory that internal shocks are important for policy change. Policy change followed other pathways too, particularly policy-oriented learning. As for policy-oriented learning, it was manifested in different ways, e.g. the acceptance of the core beliefs and proposals for amending the IMB provisions put forward by the coalition opposing IMB by a majority of Member States in the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament and the proponents of IMB. Besides contributing to development of scientific theory, the knowledge provided in the paper can inform various stakeholders to better shape their future strategies in advocacy work in European Union policy making and national policy implementation.

Interest Pressures and Carbon Taxation: Evidence from Vietnam

Article

Jan 2020

Kasper Vrolijk

Subnational bipartisanship on climate change: evidence from surveys of local and state policymakers

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021
CLIMATIC CHANGE

While the US Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the national legislation to address climate change over the years, there has been much more progress among state and local governments. Is this progress on climate change policy at the subnational level merely a reflection of the dominance of the Democratic Party in certain regions of the country, or does it reflect successful bipartisan action? In this essay, we present novel evidence from two surveys of subnational policymakers, conducted in 2015 and 2017, to demonstrate that there is widespread bipartisan agreement among Republican and Democrat policymakers at the subnational level about (1) the existence of global warming and (2) what to do about it. Specifically, a majority in both parties believe global warming is happening and support the use of renewable energy mandates—rather than cap-and-trade, carbon tax, or emissions standards—to address the problem.

Subnational Bipartisanship on Climate Change: Evidence from Surveys of Local and State Policymakers

Preprint

Nov 2020

While the U.S. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass national legislation to address climate change over the years, there has been much more progress among state and local governments. But is this progress on climate change policy at the subnational level merely a reflection of the dominance of the Democratic party in certain regions of the country, or does it reflect successful bipartisan action? In this essay, we present novel evidence from two surveys of subnational policymakers, conducted in 2015 and 2017, to demonstrate that there is widespread bipartisan agreement among Republican and Democrat policymakers at the subnational level about (1) the existence of global warming and (2) what to do about it. Specifically, a majority in both parties believe global warming is happening and support the use of renewable energy mandates—rather than cap-and-trade, carbon tax, or emissions standards—to address the problem.

Structural conflict under the new green dilemma: Inequalities in development of renewable energy for emerging economies

Article

Nov 2020

Climate Change related concerns affect multiple international and national policy forefronts. Globally, conflicts over renewables industry between the developed and emerging economies have affected the provision of green goods-thus slowing the overall welfare of global environmental governance. This article argues that the above phenomenon is a new form of green dilemma which arises from the long-lasting issue of balancing environmental protection and economic gains. It further tracks the historical evolutionary change of green dilemma, from version 1.0 to 2.0 to the current avatar of Green Dilemma 3.0. By developing the Green Dilemma Framework, the article aims to uncover the logic underlying the industrial policies and trade conflicts between the developed and emerging economies in their energy transitions. Utilizing the US vs China and US vs India conflicts in the solar PV industries as the two group of cases, the key feature of Green Dilemma 3.0 is illustrated as the conflict over status and control of the global division of labor in the new energy industry. This article offers a novel perspective on global inequality by deconstructing the unequal global production system that can act to restrict the optimization of energy use and production in tackling climate change and thus successively hindering global environmental governance in its realization of optimal results. Underneath global climate change governance, there is an unequal global production network and political system, and both these follow a core, semi-periphery, and periphery distribution of power structure. We argue that the inequality of global production system suppresses the effects of subsidy competition and erodes the economic foundation of global climate governance.

When competition plays clean: How electricity market liberalization facilitated state-level climate policies in the United States

Article

Apr 2020
ENERG POLICY

Nathan Lee

Why do some governments adopt policies to mitigate climate change while others do not? In this study, I illustrate the importance of industrial organization in shaping prospects for climate mitigation policy. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, I show that U.S. states which adopt electricity market liberalization laws are subsequently fifteen to forty-three percentage points more likely to adopt a renewable portfolio standard and fifteen to thirty percentage points more likely to adopt a cap-and-trade program. I argue that the forced reduction in market share of incumbent utilities associated with market liberalization laws undermined the political dominance of legacy producers and facilitated the growth of independent power producers (IPPs). Following liberalization, I show how these firms disproportionately benefited from the development of renewable energy, and how their growth in market share corresponded with a rise in political activity, thus offering a countervailing industrial interest-group influence to legacy producers. These findings demonstrate the importance of industrial organization in shaping long-run prospects for climate mitigation. More generally, this study sheds light on how government interventions can shape industrial interest-group dynamics.

Interesų grupių įtaka formuojant atsinaujinančios energetikos viešąją politiką Lietuvoje 2008–2018 m.

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2019

Interest groups play an important role in public policy-making and decision-making in public sector governance. While abroad, interest groups have been extensively analysed by scholars, but the assessment of the influence of interest group activities on public policymaking in Lithuania is insufficient. The problem of the research is that this field has not been thoroughly analysed until now. There is no universally agreed and defined definition about kind of activity of interest group and its influence in Lithuania. Thus, in the context of existing research, there is a need for a deeper insight into the activities of interest groups with a focus on assessing their impact on public governance. The object of this article is interest groups and their activities in the Lithuanian renewable energy (RE) sector. The aim of the research described in this article is to investigate the interest groups acting in the RE sector and the influence of the activities on public policy-making in 2008–2018. Authors, based on the functions of interest groups, distinguish the main principles of their activities: to properly analyse the situation, to express themselves publicly and to communicate with society, to form a positive attitude, which would be accepted by both the interest group and the society. In addition, interest groups communicate directly with government officials, attend public hearings, report on current political issues, and appear in the media. Involvement of interest groups can be defined as the process by which interest groups or their representatives, together with officials, are involved in raising issues of major importance to society, formulating policy, discussing and deciding on issues relevant to the management of the RE sector. It can be argued that although the public policy is formulated and implemented by public authorities during the public governance process, there are various interest parties involved at different stages of the process. They can formally become influential interest groups according to the value of their influence and the relevance of the issue. All interested parties have an opportunity to participate in the process of developing the legal framework, but the proposals of all of them are not considered due to the aspect of renewable energy. There is no unified database in Lithuania, which contains all interest groups acting in Lithuania. Therefore, it is necessary to typologize them. The typology is based on Kaunas University of Technology scientists’ group project 2015–2017: Interaction between parties and interest groups: nature, causes, consequences, according to the specifics of the Lithuanian RE sector. In order to investigate the activities of the interest groups, the methods of document analysis and descriptive statistics were applied. Comprehensive data collection and systematisation was carried out on the basis of the Seimas committees’ meeting documents, and on the basis of the received analysis data, typology of interest groups and their impact assessment was performed. In order to find out the involvement of interest groups in the public-governance of the ER sector, the analysis of meetings of the Seimas committees and commissions in 2008–2019 was carried out. During the period 2007–2010, issues relevant to the RE sector were discussed. In the documents of meetings invited persons and those who actively made proposals have been highlighted, thus identifying interest groups. In the second stage of research, based on the typology presented in the article earlier, interest groups were categorized by adapting the table accordingly to the interest groups involved in public governance in the RE sector. The third stage identifies the most influential interest groups acting in the public sector of the RE, according to the number (activity) of proposals submitted to the draft laws and accordingly the number of submitted proposals. This is how the percentage of influence was derived. As the results of the research have shown, that interest groups have the greatest influence in the public government process of the RE sector at the stage of public policy making. However, the balancing of interests does not produce the desired results due to insufficient influence of the interest group. By researching the activities of interest groups in the RE sector policy making stage, types of interest groups can be established according to their members’ goals, activities, aspirations, and relationships. After research of the Seimas activities in 2008–2018 related to activities in RE policy-making, it can be stated that the public administration organizations and their associations are most active interest groups in submitting amendments to the law. They have submitted 867 proposals during the analysed period. Members of the Seimas have submitted 414 proposals. During the period which was under review, 250 business proposals were submitted by business interest groups and only 28 by public interest groups.

Mid-Century Strategies: pathways to a low-carbon future?

Article

Jul 2019

Since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, both national and subnational governments have been encouraged to submit Mid-Century Strategies, outlining how they would reach their deep decarbonization goals. However, research on the design and potential of these strategies has been very limited. To address this shortcoming, here we assess 13 such strategies – six national, seven subnational – in a comparative fashion. We find that the energy-economy-climate models underpinning these strategies are generally of high quality, though national jurisdictions generally performed better. However, most strategies are not plausible without significant changes to policy, and the industrial sector in particular presents a major limitation. The strategies are helpful in revealing this gap, but much works remains to be done for plausible mid-century decarbonization trajectories to become a reality. We also find that public input and societal participation in strategy building were a double-edged sword depending on the constellation of domestic preferences. • Governmental Mid-Century Strategies for deep decarbonization are underpinned by high-quality energy-economy-climate models • Governments’ proposed strategies require significant new policies, as even among jurisdictions that have an MCS, extant policies are insufficient to achieve deep decarbonization • No jurisdiction studied has yet put forward a plausible decarbonization policy for the industrial sector. • Public input and societal participation can be a double-edged sword: they can increase durability of the strategy but also enable opposing forces to mobilize against ambitious changes.

Financial support vis-à-vis share of wind generation: Is there an inflection point?

Article

May 2019
ENERGY

Wind power is one of the leading source of renewable energy in terms of installed capacity, power generation and technology maturity in the world today. It is promoted through financial support such as Feed-In Tariffs (FIT), renewable certificates, investment grants and tax incentives almost everywhere in the world. Attractive power pricing and a general global thrust for renewables have resulted in increasing the wind power capacity from 17 GW in 2000 to 514 GW in 2017. This paper analyses the relationship between financial mechanisms and wind capacity and wind power generation across 15 countries and 10 US states over 2006–2017. These countries/states contribute to 88% of total wind generation capacity in 2017, and contribution of their individual wind capacities to overall electricity generation rose from 0.15 to 24.2% (2006) to 1.2–38.5% (2017). Our analysis indicates that the trend of financial support reverses beyond an inflection point vis-à-vis the share of wind power in total power generated. The inflection point exists for all countries but the value varies across countries. The relationships are statistically significant. This has important policy implications with regard to the governments’ approach towards promoting wind power as share of wind generation increases.

Energy market liberalization and renewable energy policies in OECD countries

Article

May 2019
ENERG POLICY

This paper investigates the effect of energy liberalization, compared to other drivers, on policies that support renewable energy in a long panel of OECD countries. We estimate this effect by accounting for the endogeneity of liberalization related to joint decisions within a country’s energy strategy. Using regulation in other industries as instruments, we find that energy liberalization increases public support for renewable energy. The effect of liberalization is the second largest after the effect of per-capita income and is mostly driven by reductions in entry barriers, while the effect of privatization is unclear. This finding suggests that a reduction in the monopolistic power of state-owned utilities has a positive effect on renewable energy policies when various types of actors are ensured access to the grid instead of it being provided to only a few large private firms.

Consistent covariance matrix estimation with spatially dependent data

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1998

A tale of two Markets

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2007

Stephen Roulac

Real Estate Capital Market Report

Transnational Corporate Interests and Global Environmental Governance: Negotiating Rules for Agricultural Biotechnology and Chemicals

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2003

Jennifer Clapp

This essay examines the role of the agricultural input industry in the negotiation of two environmental treaties: the Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. It seeks to explain why industry players were willing to accept a phase-out of POPs chemicals but were reluctant to accept strict regulation of the trade in genetically modified organisms. This comparison is an important one to consider, as the line that once divided the agricultural chemicals and agricultural biotechnology industries has become more blurred, such that many of the same firms now are involved in both pesticide production and agricultural biotechnology. The essay argues that in order to fully understand industry positions on these two treaties, economic factors facing these industries must be examined. The shifting profitability of the pesticides and seeds industries over the past two decades goes a long way to explaining not only the positions industry players took in these two environmental treaty negotiations, but also the merger of the two sectors in recent years.

Do Democracies Exhibit Stronger International Environmental Commitment? A Cross-Country Analysis

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2002
J PEACE RES

Eric Neumayer

This article tests the hypothesis that democracies exhibit stronger international environmental commitment than non-democracies, using multivariate econometric techniques. A number of proxy variables are used in lieu of environmental commitment, a non-observable variable. Strong evidence is found that democracies sign and ratify more multilateral environmental agreements, participate in more environmental intergovernmental organizations, comply better with reporting requirements under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora, put a greater percentage of their land area under protections status, are more likely to have a National Council on Sustainable Development in their country and have more environmentally relevant information available than non-democracies. The findings suggest that a spread of democracy around the world will lead to enhanced environmental commitment worldwide. Results are robust with respect to inclusion or exclusion of developed countries in the sample. The use of four different variables for democracy also ensures robustness with respect to the measure of democracy. The strong evidence in favour of a positive link between democracy and environmental commitment stands in contrast to the somewhat weak evidence on such a link between democracy and environmental outcomes. The explanation presumably is that theory predicts a stronger positive link of democracy with environmental commitment than with environmental outcomes.

The Choice of Regulatory Instruments in Environmental Policy

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1998
HARVARD ENVIRON LAW

Greenhouse gas reductions in Germany - Lucky strike or hard work?

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2001

With greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions decreasing by more than 18% in the 1990s, Germany appears to be among the few industrialised countries which are on track to meet the targets they committed themselves to under the Kyoto Protocol. This achievement may appear less remarkable if one takes into account that Germany benefited from so-called “wall-fall profits”, i.e. the breakdown and restructuring of the East German economy after reunification in 1990. Nevertheless, various policies at national, regional, and local levels were introduced in the 1990s in Germany, which also resulted in a reduction of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.The objective of this paper is to examine the underlying factors for the GHG emission trends in Germany in the 1990s. In particular, it is estimated to what extent the observed reductions are wall-fall profits, and to what extent they are the result of policy measures.The findings indicate that wall-fall profits account for almost 50% of the reduction of all six greenhouse gases. This share increases to 60% if only energy-related CO2 emissions are considered. At the same time, a diverse set of policies also had a significant effect on the reduction of greenhouse gases. Environmental policies directed towards non-CO2 gases were as important as policies addressing CO2 emissions. Overall, the contribution of all the policies combined was slightly higher than the impact of unification. Although Germany is on a reduction path to meet the Kyoto target, the likelihood of it achieving the more ambitious national target without additional policy efforts appears rather slim.

Is There Really a Link Between Neo-Corporatism and Environmental Performance? Updated Evidence and New Data for the 1980s and 1990s

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2001
BRIT J POLIT SCI

Lyle Scruggs

In a previous article in this Journal entitled ‘Institutions and Environmental Performance in Seventeen Western Democracies’ (29 (1999), 1–31), I argued that neo-corporatist institutions delivered superior environmental performance during the first two decades of the modern environmental era (1970–90). 1 This note re-examines the thesis using slightly different data from a more recent time period (19807ndash;95). It also controls for some alternative explanations for environmental performance not included in the original article. The results suggest that the beneficial effects of neo-corporatism for environmental performance are robust. In confirming the results from the earlier analysis, this Note demonstrates the effects of neo-corporatism in unexpected policy areas. The positive results for environmental protection suggest that there may be benefits of neo-corporatist institutions in areas beyond those with which they are traditionally associated.

Beyond Agrification: Twenty Five Years of Policy and Innovation for Non-food Application of Renewable Resources in the Netherlands

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2008
BIOFUEL BIOPROD BIOR

The first part of this review describes policy developments in the Netherlands since the 1980s around innovations for non-food application of renewable resources. Next, these developments are analyzed using the Strategic Niche Management (SNM) theory. The drivers at the regime level and the quality of the processes at the niche level have increased considerably in the last number of years. The trend toward a much wider use of renewable resources for non-food applications thus seems more robust than it was in the previous century. From the SNM analysis, we derive a number of recommendations for policy-makers active in this field. We also present a previously unpublished stakeholder study performed in 2000 on the factors of success for innovations in this field, and derive from this study recommendations for innovators active in the field. © 2008 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

International Regime Formation Revisited: Explaining Ratification Behaviour with Respect to Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Agreements in Europe

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2010

We draw on the policy diffusion literature to shed more light on the determinants of treaty ratification, a crucial step in the formation of international regimes. Our hypotheses stipulate that a country's ratification behaviour is influenced by the ratification choices of other countries in general, or of specific types of other countries. The underlying argument is that the ratification behaviour of (specific) other countries sends particular signals - for instance signals about implementation costs, competitiveness effects or reputation costs - to the country in question. The empirical testing is done on data for ratification of the UN Economic Commission for Europe's agreements on long-range transboundary air pollution. The results show that international factors are as important in influencing ratification choices as domestic factors. This result raises interesting questions about the relative importance of international and domestic determinants in different policy areas and at different stages of international regime formation.

Renewable Energy Policies and Technological Innovation: Evidence Based on Patent Counts

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2009

This paper examines the effect of environmental policies on technological innovation in the specific case of renewable energy. The analysis is conducted using patent data on a panel of 25 countries over the period 1978–2003. We find that public policy plays a significant role in determining patent applications. Different types of policy instruments are effective for different renewable energy sources. Broad-based policies, such as tradable energy certificates, are more likely to induce innovation on technologies that are close to competitive with fossil fuels. More targeted subsidies, such as feed-in tariffs, are needed to induce innovation on more costly energy technologies, such as solar power.

Industry lobbying and the political economy of GHG trade in the European Union

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2005
ENERG POLICY

The European Union (EU) has committed itself to meet an 8% greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target level following the Kyoto agreement. In September 2003 the EU member states has agreed on the Directive for establishing a scheme for GHG emission allowance trading within the European Union. This directive is the outcome of a policy process started by the EU Commission and its Green Paper from March 2000. The main industrial stakeholders all had the opportunity to comment on the Green Paper and from their positions we will analyse how far they are winners or losers compared to the final directive proposal. Comparing the initial Green Paper proposal (before lobbyism) to the final directive (after lobbyism) gave us a unique possibility for measuring the effect of lobbyism. Here, we find that the dominant interest groups indeed influenced the final design of an EU GHG market. This industrial rent-seeking most prominently leads to a grandfathered permit allocation rule like the one found in the US tradeable permit systems.

Are Left-Wing Party Strength and Corporatism Good for the Environment? Evidence From Panel Analysis of Air Pollution in OECD Countries

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2003
ECOL ECON

Eric Neumayer

The effect of left-wing party strength and corporatism on air pollution levels in up to 21 OECD countries over the period 1980 or 1990–1999 is tested with both fixed-effects and random-effects estimators. Controlling for scale, composition, technique as well as aggregate time effects, robust evidence is found that parliamentary green/left-libertarian party strength is associated with lower pollution levels. The rise of ecologically oriented parties has thus had a real impact on air pollution levels. Traditional left-wing party strength is possibly also associated with lower pollution levels, but the evidence is less consistent and robust. Combined left-wing party strength in government is possibly associated with higher pollution levels, but this result is also far from robust and is practically small. No evidence is found for a consistent systematic impact of corporatism on pollution levels.

A Tale of Two Market Failures: Technology and Environmental Policy

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2005
ECOL ECON

Market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies. These combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology. Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives, and can be cost-effectively harnessed through the use of economic-incentive based policy. In the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies, investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable. Positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives. While environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties, a long-term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success.

Environmental Pressure Group Strength and Air Pollution: An Empirical Analysis

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2004

There is an established theoretical and empirical case-study literature arguing that environmental pressure groups have a real impact on pollution levels. Our original contribution to this literature is to provide the first systematic quantitative test of the strength of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) on air pollution levels. We find that ENGO strength exerts a statistically significant impact on sulfur dioxide, smoke and heavy particulates concentration levels in a cross-country time-series regression analysis. This result holds true both for ordinary least squares and random-effects estimation. It is robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of ENGO strength with the help of instrumental variables. The effect is also substantively important. Strengthening ENGOs represents an important strategy by which aid donors, foundations, international organizations and other stakeholders can try to achieve lower pollution levels around the world.

Inference for Unit Roots in Dynamic Panels Where the Time Dimension Is Fixed

Article

Full-text available

Feb 1999
J ECONOMETRICS

This paper derives similar, asymptotic unit root tests for first-order autoregressive panel data models, assuming that the time dimension of the panel is fixed. It is shown that the limiting distributions of the test statistics are normal. The assumption that the time dimension is fixed allows us to derive analytical expressions for the moments of the distributions. Similarity with respect to the initial conditions of the data generating process is achieved by including fixed effect dummy variables in the regression model, while similarity with respect to fixed effects in the data generating process is achieved by including a linear deterministic trend for each individual unit of the panel. When fixed effects or individual trends are included as regressors the least squares estimator of the autoregressive parameter is inconsistent and thus the test statistics must be appropriately adjusted. Monte Carlo evidence suggests that the proposed tests have empirical size that is very close to the nominal five percent level and substantially more power than the corresponding unit root tests for the single time series case.

An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism

Article

Jan 2001

The relationship between crude oil and natural gas prices

Article

Jan 2006

An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism

Article

Aug 2001

Applying the new economics of organization and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross‐national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterize the ‘varieties of capitalism’ found among the developed economies. Building on a distinction between ‘liberal market economies’ and ‘coordinated market economies’, it explores the impact of these variations on economic performance and many spheres of policy‐making, including macroeconomic policy, social policy, vocational training, legal decision‐making, and international economic negotiations. The volume examines the institutional complementarities across spheres of the political economy, including labour markets, markets for corporate finance, the system of skill formation, and inter‐firm collaboration on research and development that reinforce national equilibria and give rise to comparative institutional advantages, notably in the sphere of innovation where LMEs are better placed to sponsor radical innovation and CMEs to sponsor incremental innovation. By linking managerial strategy to national institutions, the volume builds a firm‐centred comparative political economy that can be used to assess the response of firms and governments to the pressures associated with globalization. Its new perspectives on the welfare state emphasize the role of business interests and of economic systems built on general or specific skills in the development of social policy. It explores the relationship between national legal systems, as well as systems of standards setting, and the political economy. The analysis has many implications for economic policy‐making, at national and international levels, in the global age.

Social Movements and Industry Development: The Environmental Movement's Impact on the Wind Energy Industry

Article

Sep 2009

Ion Vasi

This article builds a theoretical framework that highlights the role of social movements in industry emergence and growth. Using insights from the literature on social movement outcomes and industry creation, the article shows that the environmental movement has shaped the development of the wind energy industry at both the national and subnational levels. During the past two decades, wind power has transformed from a small, "alternative" energy industry into a multibillion-dollar global industry that produces electricity for millions of people. Quantitative analysis shows that the wind energy industry grows the fastest in countries and regions that have not only a high density of environmental groups but also good wind potential or a favorable political opportunity structure. Case studies deepen this picture by examining how environmental organizations contribute to the development of the wind energy industry.

Feed-in tariffs: Accelerating the deployment of renewable energy

Article

Apr 2012

Miguel Mendonca

A feed-in tariff is a renewable energy law that obliges energy suppliers to buy electricity produced from renewable resources at a fixed price, usually over a fixed period - even from householders. These legal guarantees ensure investment security, and the support of all viable renewable energy technologies. Supporters argue that the feed-in model, if implemented effectively around the world, would greatly assist the energy revolution that is so desperately required; through CO2 reduction, market creation and development, job creation and improved energy security. Feed-in Tariffs is a concise introduction to feed-in laws, examining the experience of countries that have implemented this model. The author argues that the policy should be implemented anywhere with a suitable national power grid infrastructure, and identifies variations on the policy for those areas without. Alternative models and support schemes are examined to provide policy makers with the information required to consider the implementation of feed-in tariffs, and to introduce the concept to renewable energy technology manufacturers, producers, investors and supporters. With a foreword by Hermann Scheer. Published with the World Future Council.

Social movements and industry development: The environmental movement's impact on the wind energy industry

Article

Jan 2009

I.B. Vast

Why Do States Adopt Renewable Portfolio Standards?: An Empirical Investigation

Article

Jul 2010
ENERG J

Renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) for electricity generation are politically popular in many U.S. states although economic analysis suggests they are not first-best policies. We present an empirical analysis of the political and economic factors that drive state governments to adopt an RPS, and the factors that lead to the inclusion of in-state requirements given the adoption of an RPS. Although advocates claim an RPS will stimulate job growth, we find that states with high unemployment rates are slower to adopt an RPS. Local environmental conditions and preferences have no significant effect on the timing of adoption. Overall, RPS adoption seems to be driven more by political ideology and private interests than by local environmental and employment benefits, raising questions as to when environmental federalism serves the public interest.

Confronting the Environmental Kuznets Curve

Article

Dec 2002
J ECON PERSPECT

The environmental Kuznets curve posits an inverted-U relationship between pollution and economic development. Pessimistic critics of empirically estimated curves have argued that their declining portions are illusory, either because they are cross-sectional snapshots that mask a long-run "race to the bottom" in environmental standards, or because industrial societies will continually produce new pollutants as the old ones are controlled. However, recent evidence has fostered an optimistic view by suggesting that the curve is actually flattening and shifting to the left. The driving forces appear to be economic liberalization, clean technology diffusion, and new approaches to pollution regulation in developing countries.

Who Governs?

Article

Jul 1962
YALE LAW J

Counteractive Lobbying

Article

Feb 1994

Since the 1960s, interest group scholars have suggested that groups mostly lobby legislators who, prior to lobbying, are expected to support their favored positions. We present theoretical and empirical evidence that, other things being equal, groups also lobby legislators who are predisposed to vote against their favored positions. We find that when groups lobby their ex ante supporters, they do so to counteract the influence of opposition groups. On the basis of our findings, we argue that organized interests play a much more prominent and substantial role in the legislative process than past research indicates.

The Theory of Environmental Policy.

Article

Nov 1976

Environment and Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making

Article

Jan 2004

Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy

Article

Jan 1995
FOREIGN AFF

Environmental Statistics: Methods and Applications

Article

Oct 2005

Vic Barnett

Quadrat Sampling Recapture Sampling Transect Sampling Adaptive Sampling

Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work

Book

Dec 2002

George Tsebelis

Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto Players advances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo. Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics, Veto Players will be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.

Environmental Policy and Party Divergence in Congress

Article

Jun 2001

The question of whether parties converge or diverge over time has attracted a great deal of theoretical and empirical attention. In this article we make two contributions to this literature. First, rather than looking at general measures of ideology, we examine a specific policy area-environmental policy to see whether the parties have diverged or converged. We utilize ratings produced by the League of Conservation Voters to obtain measures of congressional voting. Unlike other issue-specific studies of divergence, we adjust these scores, using a methodology recently developed by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999), to make them comparable across time. Our results show that Republicans and Democrats in Congress have diverged over time on environmental issues. Second, once we determine that the parties have diverged, we analyze the underlying causes of this divergence. We provide three explanations for divergence between the two parties, based on the fact that parties are not monolithic but rather are made up of regional, factional, and individual components. If regions behave differently on an issue, then shifting representation of regions within parties will lead to shifts in overall party behavior. When internal factions with stronger views than the general party are more supported by interest groups and less constrained by issue salience or economic conditions, then the parties are more likely to diverge. And when party members are replaced by individuals with different views on an issue, overall party behavior shifts accordingly.

States, NGOs, and International Environmental Institutions

Article

Dec 1997
INT STUD QUART

Kal Raustiala

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly important participants in international environmental institutions. NGOs have been formally—but not fully—incorporated into what were previously “states-only” activities. This article surveys these new participatory roles and offers an analytical framework for understanding the pattern, terms, and significance, for international theory, of NGO inclusion. NGOs are distinctive entities with important skills and resources to deploy in the process of international environmental cooperation. Rather than undermining state sovereignty, active NGO participation enhances the abilities of states to regulate globally. The empirical pattern of NGO participation has been structured across time and functional areas to reap these gains. Recent evidence from the restructuring of the World Bank's Environment Facility is used to test these claims. That NGOs are now more pervasive in international environmental institutions illustrates the expansion, not the retreat, of the state in addressing global environmental problems.

The Theory of Environmental Policy|2nd Edition

Article

Jan 1975

In this book, Professors Baumol and Oates provide a rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the economic theory of environmental policy. They present a formal, theoretical treatment of those factors influencing the quality of life. By covering both the theory of externalities and its application to environmental policy, the authors have retained the basic structure and organization of the first edition, which has become a standard reference in the field. In this edition, however, they have updated their analysis to incorporate recent research in environmental economics.

The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion

Article

Dec 1951
West Polit Q

David Bicknell Truman

Information and Influence: Lobbying for Agendas and Votes

Article

Aug 1993

David Austin-smith

This paper explores the extent and character of interest group influence on legislative policy in a model of decision making under incomplete information. A committee may propose an alternative to a given status quo under closed rule. Policies are related to consequences with ex ante uncertainty. An interest group is able to acquire policy-relevant information at a price and has access to legislators at both the agenda-setting stage and the vote stage. Lobbying is modeled as a game of strategic information transmission. The price of information is itself a private datum to the group, and legislators cannot observe whether the group elects to become informed. If the group is informed, then its information is likewise private. Among the results are that not all informed lobbyists choose to try to influence the agenda directly; that there can coexist influential lobbying at both stages of the process; and that while informative agenda stage lobbying is generically influential, the same is not true of voting stage lobbying.

Signs of Hubris: The Shaping of Wind Technology Styles in Germany, Denmark, and the United States, 1940-1990

Article

Oct 1998
TECHNOL CULT

Matthias Heymann

Technology and Culture 39.4 (1998) 641-670 A huge body of scholarship in recent decades has convincingly demonstrated the contingent and contextual character of technological development. Technologies are shaped by social factors and thus "mirror our societies." Regional and national characteristics of technological developments can often be explained by their embedment in different cultures and environments. To describe or explain technological differences, historians of technology have employed the loosely defined concept of "technological style," which in recent years has received growing attention. Drawing extensively on this concept, John Staudenmaier has raised the possibility of a "link between technological style and national character." The development of wind technology from 1940 to 1990 in Germany, Denmark, and the United States does at first glance appear to corroborate Staudenmaier's hypothesis. Wind technology in these countries differs in conspicuous ways. The renaissance of wind power technology in California and Denmark in the 1980s contained several notable surprises. California produced scores of unsuccessful turbine designs, poorly performing turbines, and disastrous turbine failures, especially when compared to the clearly superior Danish wind technology. The American failure looks even worse when one considers that between 1975 and 1988 the United States government spent twenty times (and Germany five times) as much for wind power research and development as did Denmark, yet Danish manufacturers made better turbines -- have, indeed, since the early 1980s been the most successful wind turbine producers. Danish wind turbines supplied about 45 percent of the total worldwide wind turbine capacity in 1990. Most U.S. manufacturers failed in the 1980s, and by 1990 only one major manufacturer of commercial turbines (US Windpower) remained. Producers from other countries had little impact on the total wind turbine capacity in the 1980s. The failure of numerous turbine designs and the remarkable contrast between R&D expenditures and commercial success raise important questions. Why did so many designs fail? What made Danish turbines superior? How could small Danish companies outclass large American and German high-tech concerns? Forrest Stoddard, an American engineer, identified characteristic technical differences of Danish and American turbines that he considered responsible for Danish success and American failures. Peter Karnøe, a Danish political scientist, has explained the superiority of Danish wind turbines as a result of Danish manufacturers' "bottom-up" strategy for development: a slow, crafts-oriented, step-by-step process including incremental learning through practical experience. This strategy, Karnøe argues, proved superior to the "top-down" approaches of science-oriented German and American researchers and manufacturers, which aimed at both quick and ambitious full-scale developments. Karnøe has shown that many striking wind turbine failures may be attributed to the disadvantages of top-down development. Stoddard's and Karnøe's interpretations offer interesting explanations for the remarkable Danish success, but they do not answer all the questions posed. Why did the Danish bottom-up strategy prove more successful than American and German top-down approaches, and why did this strategy evolve in Denmark, and only there? Historical analysis shows that technical and conceptual differences in wind turbine development had important roots in the 1940s and 1950s. Individual and collective ideas and working styles can be attributed to individual actors and particular communities, both of which have characteristic patterns of knowledge, actions, and artifacts. These patterns may be called technological styles. The failure of a top-down approach to the development of wind technology reveals the limits of science-oriented technological development, or engineering science, and hints at technological hubris. Big-science and high-tech approaches were in this case mistakenly considered powerful enough to support gigantism, extreme technical sophistication, and immediate full-scale development. Wind power's long and rich history reached its zenith in industrializing western Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the use of wind power declined, and thousands of windmills and wind turbines disappeared within a few decades. By the 1980s, however, oil crises, growing concern over environmental degradation, and nuclear-power protests were contributing to a revival of wind technology. Supported by government subsidies, California and Denmark became by far the biggest markets for wind turbines. By the late 1980s, California accounted for 79 percent...

Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy

Article

Feb 2006
AM POLIT SCI REV

Professional lobbyists are among the most experienced, knowledgeable, and strategic actors one can find in the everyday practice of politics. Nonetheless, their behavioral patterns often appear anomalous when viewed in the light of existing theories. We revisit these anomalies in search of an alternative theory. We model lobbying not as exchange (vote buying) or persuasion (informative signaling) but as a form of legislative subsidy—a matching grant of policy information, political intelligence, and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators. The proximate political objective of this strategy is not to change legislators' minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives. The theory is simple in form, realistic in its principal assumptions, and counterintuitive in its main implications. Empirically, the model renders otherwise anomalous regularities comprehensible and predictable. In a later section, we briefly bring preferences back in, examining the important but relatively uncommon conditions under which preference-centered lobbying should occur.

In Whose Interest? Pressure Group Politics, Economic Competition and Environmental Regulation

Article

May 2004
J Publ Pol

Thomas Bernauer

One school of thought in the literature on regulatory competition in environmental and consumer policy argues that inter-jurisdictional competition promotes regulatory laxity. The other highlights rent-seeking as a major driving force, implying that regulatory laxity is rare because rent-seeking is omnipresent. We observe that in most areas of environmental and consumer policy in advanced industrialized countries regulation has become much stricter since the 1970s. What then has been driving environmental and consumer risk regulation up? A popular explanation holds that large green jurisdictions have been forcing their trading partners to trade or ratchet up their regulation. In addition, political economists have developed bottom up explanations focusing on interest group politics and corporate behaviour. This article adds to the latter line by endogenising public perceptions and by exploring the effects of corporate environmental performance strategies on environmental and consumer risk policy. The empirical relevance of propositions is illustrated with case studies on growth hormones, electronic waste, and food safety.

Why is there No Wind Rush in France?

Article

Sep 2007
Eur Environ

Joseph Szarka

In France, an ambitious programme to expand electricity from renewables was outlined in the year 2000 Electricity Bill and led to the establishment of a feed-in tariff guaranteeing kilowatt hour prices to targeted suppliers. Because this support mechanism was a major cause of the dramatic expansion of wind power in Denmark, Germany and Spain, it was expected to have similar consequences in France. However, the pace of expansion proved moderate over 2000–5, with some acceleration since. This article explains these outcomes by reference to three factors: (1) the influence of institutional frameworks, (2) the impact of industry structures and (3) the role of mobilising discourses. Finally, it surveys policy reforms in 2005–7 to accelerate deployment. Noting that France's 2010 target of 21% of electricity generation from renewables is unlikely to be met, the article concludes that policy makers need to look beyond the mere choice of policy instrument (such as a feed-in tariff). Its main finding is that the impact of a policy instrument is heavily influenced not just by its settings (in this context, the level of economic incentive offered to market actors) but also by the institutional and industrial contexts of usage and by the relevance of mobilising discourses. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

EU Energy-Intensive Industries and Emission Trading: Losers Becoming Winners?

Article

Sep 2009

Jørgen Wettestad

The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) initially treated power producers and energy-intensive industries similarly, despite clear structural differences between these industries regarding e.g. pass-through of costs. Hence, the energy-intensive industries could be seen as losing out in the internal distribution. In the January 2008 proposal for a reformed ETS post-2012, a differentiated system was proposed where the energy-intensive industries would come out relatively much better. Why is this? Although power producers still have a dominant position in the system, the increasing consensus about windfall profits has weakened their standing. Conversely, increasing attention to such profits and not least the possibility of global carbon leakage has strengthened the case of energy-intensive industries at both national and EU levels. These industries have become more active in EU processes and somewhat better organized. Finally, growing fear of lax global climate policies has strengthened the case of these industries further. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Taking Time Seriously

Article

Jan 2008
AM J POLIT SCI

Dramatic world change has stimulated interest in research questions about the dynamics of politics. We have seen increases in the number of time series data sets and the length of typical time series. But three shortcomings are prevalent in published time series analysis. First, analysts often estimate models without testing restrictions implied by their specification. Second, researchers link the theoretical concept of equilibrium with cointegration and error correction models. Third, analysts often do a poor job of interpreting results. The consequences include weak connections between theory and tests, biased estimates, and incorrect inferences. We outline techniques for estimating linear dynamic regressions with stationary data and weakly exogenous regressors. We recommend analysts (1) start with general dynamic models and test restrictions before adopting a particular specification and (2) use the wide array of information available from dynamic specifications. We illustrate this strategy with data on Congressional approval and tax rates across OECD countries.

Competitive Lobbying for Legislators' Votes

Article

Jan 1992

This paper develops a model of interest group lobbying based on the central premise that such lobbying is fundamentally an exercise in strategic information transmission. Lobbyists typically possess information that legislators do not and, inter alia, such information is relevant to legislators when it concerns the consequences — either policy or political — of supporting one bill rather than another. However, given that the interests of lobbyists do not necessarily coincide with those of legislators, the extent to which a lobbyist is able to persuade a legislator to act in his or her interest is moot. The paper explores the extent to which lobbyists can influence a legislative decision in such a setting; in particular, we are concerned with the incentives for interest groups to acquire costly information and lobby a legislator when there exist other groups that do not share the same interests. Among the results are that a legislator will on average make better decisions with lobbying than without, and that the more important is an issue to a special interest group, the more likely is the legislator to make the correct full-information decision.

Diversification and Localization of Energy Systems for Sustainable Development and Energy Security

Article

Feb 2005
ENERG POLICY

Xianguo Li

The dominance of a single-energy system inevitably leads to excessive burden on, and eventually weakening, a particular aspect of the environment, and can cause environmental fatigue and failure (permanent damage) or even catastrophe if dominated for too long; thus it inevitably poses the health and environmental risk. This is the case for our currently fossil-fuel-based energy systems. In fact, each energy system, including renewables and alternative fuels, has its own unique adverse impact on the environment, as dictated by the second law of thermodynamics. A truly sustainable development may be achieved with the diversification and localization of energy sources and systems if the adverse impact of each energy system is sufficiently small and well within the tolerance limit of the environment. Energy diversification and localization would also provide a security for the energy supply and distribution as well for the energy consumers—a specifically important issue in the wake of blackout (electric power failure) in the Northeastern states to the Midwest of the United States and part of Canada on August 14, 2003. The idea of diversified energy systems for the good of humanity and environment is similar to many analogies in other fields, such as bio-diversity is the best means to prevent the spread and damage of diseases and pests, and diversified investment is the best strategy to guarantee the overall best investment return. It is concluded that the diversification and localization of energy systems is the best future energy systems that would be environmentally compatible, and allow for sustainable development as well as energy security for both supply and distribution to the energy consumers.

Biofuel Developments in Sweden and the Netherlands: Protection and Socio-technical Change in a Long-Term Perspective

Article

Aug 2009
RENEW SUST ENERG REV

This paper reviews long-term development of biofuels in Sweden and the Netherlands. In particular this paper explores the social dynamics of ‘niche protection’. The Swedish and Dutch cases are analyzed by means of the Strategic Niche Management (SNM) perspective extended with insights from political science. Our main argument is that the development of biofuels and the way this development is protected relies on a variety of actor strategies and (local and global) discourses. This case therefore suggests that policy making for biofuels is a complex and non-linear process that can only partly be managed by policy actors.

Lessons for Effective Renewable Electricity Policy from Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom

Article

Nov 2007
ENERG POLICY

Judith Lipp

Renewable electricity development has taken different paths across countries, underpinned by different policy frameworks. Although there has been a convergence to two main mechanisms, the feed-in tariff (FIT) and the renewable portfolio standard (RPS), much debate remains focused on the effectiveness of each for meeting multiple objectives, especially energy security, CO2 reduction and economic development. Although most countries share these objectives, their choice of policy varies, explained largely by national context. Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom stand out as lead countries based on their experiences with the FIT and RPS and provide important lessons for other nations. The evidence from these three, as examined in this paper, suggests that policy design and commitment are key factors for success. Denmark and Germany have 10 years of experience with FITs and are world leaders in the field of renewable energy (RE) development. They are closest to meeting their RE targets and have been able to achieve several other objectives, especially industrial development and job creation, and in the case of Germany, CO2 emission reductions. Although other factors have been important in determining policy choice and implementation in these countries, the particular design features of the FIT allow it to address the needs of the sector.

Corruption and Energy Efficiency in OECD Countries: Theory and Evidence

Article

Feb 2004
J ENVIRON ECON MANAG

We investigate the effect of corruption and industry sector size on energy policy outcomes. The main predictions of our theory are that: (i) greater corruptibility of policy makers reduces energy policy stringency; (ii) greater lobby group coordination costs (increased industry sector size) results in more stringent energy policy; and (iii) workers’ and capital owners’ lobbying efforts on energy policy are negatively related. These predictions are tested using a unique panel data set on the energy intensity of 11 sectors in 12 OECD countries for years 1982–1996. The evidence generally supports the predictions.

Understanding Carbon Lock In

Article

Oct 2000
ENERG POLICY

Gregory C. Unruh

This paper narrative argues that industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel-based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co-evolution driven by path-dependent increasing returns to scale. It is asserted that this condition, termed carbon lock-in, creates persistent market and policy failures that can inhibit the diffusion of carbon-saving technologies despite their apparent environmental and economic advantages. The notion of a Techno-Institutional Complex is introduced to capture the idea that lock-in occurs through combined interactions among technological systems and governing institutions. While carbon lock-in provides a conceptual basis for understanding macro-level barriers to the diffusion of carbon-saving technologies, it also generates questions for standard economic modeling approaches that abstract away technological and institutional evolution in their elaboration. The question of escaping carbon lock-in is left for a future paper.

Understanding Technology Choice in Electricity Industries: A Comparative Study of France and Denmark

Article

Dec 2000
ENERG POLICY

Constantine Hadjilambrinos

The ability to predict how national electricity industries will respond to the challenges of competition and the demand for sustainability requires a good understanding of the nature of technological systems and a workable theory of technology choice. So far, two distinct theoretical perspectives, the economic and socio-political concepts of technological systems, have competed for dominance in policy analysis and policy making. This paper is a comparative study of the way in which the electricity industries of Denmark and France responded to a series of challenges beginning with the 1973 oil crisis and continuing through the present push to liberalise electricity markets. Focussing on the forces that directed technological change in these two nations, I examine the relative importance of economic and socio-political factors. My analysis indicates that socio-political factors which, together, can be described as political traditions have shaped technology choice. The Danish and French electricity industries have pursued several objectives in addition to economic efficiency. This has limited the function of free markets. Thus, they should be understood as political structures whose most important characteristic is the distribution of power. In this context, the economic perspective represents a normative demand for the re-arrangement of political values. Technological choice which radically departs from the status quo implies a significant redistribution of political power and is, therefore, very difficult.

Fostering a Renewable Energy Technology Industry: An International Comparison of Wind Industry Policy Support Mechanisms

Article

Mar 2007
ENERG POLICY

How do Competing Interest Groups Influence Environmental Policy? The Case of Renewable Electricity in Industrialized Democracies, 1989–2007

Abstract

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