The Politics of Climate Change Innovation: Electoral Incentives Revisited

With the conclusion of the Paris Agreement, the world has given itself ambitious political goals in order to tackle climate change. In contrast to the COP15 2009 in Copenhagen, the Paris conference shifted the focus from a top-down approach to a more bottom-up form of governance. This stresses the need to better understand innovations in national legislation addressing the collective challenge of climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, the motivations of adopting new climate policies are not well understood. This is particularly true for vote-seeking politicians. On the one hand, politicians are known to shy away from controversial policies, especially ahead of elections. On the other hand, the mere amount of national climate legislation passed over the last years suggests that adopting such policies may actually offer opportunities for claiming credit. One answer to this puzzle may be related to the variety of measures that climate policy consists of (Fankhauser et al. 2015). Therefore, it is the goal of this study to investigate the political economy of this variety in greater detail. As not all climate policy measures are equally controversial, our basic argument is that policy makers will be more inclined to adopt less controversial measures, especially ahead of elections, while, conversely, refraining from adopting more controversial ones. To test our argument, we use data of the Global Climate Legislation Study to identify patterns of passage of controversial and less controversial climate legislation. In a second step, we seek to answer the research question whether there is an electoral cycle in these patterns following the outlined incentives for politicians. We also address related questions such as whether cycles depend on economic conditions or the political orientation of governments. By answering these questions, we seek to assess the role policy characteristics play for the diffusion of climate policy innovations (Makse and Volden 2011). This perspective seems even more important now given that climate governance moves potentially towards greater diversity.