Delayed Gratification: Climate Change and the Institutional Foundations of Long-term Policymaking

Long-term policy problems are everywhere, yet political science is just beginning to examine them. Politics is not only about who gets what, but who gets what and when. Three features characterise long-term problems: they last at least one human generation, they exhibit considerable uncertainty given their long time horizons and they entail problems of public goods, both at the stage of problem generation and of policy response. Climate change is often described as the quintessential long-term policy problem. Existing theoretical work argues that addressing long-term policy problems is challenging for politicians for three reasons: uncertainty about long-term outcomes, imposing short-term costs on constituents and the fragility of long-term political commitments due to problems of time-inconsistency. However, in spite of these challenges many politicians have adopted climate policy, while others have not. Leveraging cross-national variation, the paper develops and tests a theory to explain long-term climate policy investments in the advanced democracies. I argue that the variation in the level of climate policy adoption across countries can be explained by the differing incentives that are generated for public and private actors by political institutions. In particular, I examine the effects of electoral rules, legislative committee structures and interest group mediation. Political economies rooted in institutional forms that encourage negotiation, bargaining and consensus should be better able to overcome the three challenges of long-term policymaking by reaching an early cross-party consensus on the problem of climate change, adopting policies that impose most short-term costs on consumers and ensuring policy credibility through extensive veto player networks. On the other hand, political economies rooted in institutional forms that encourage competition are likely to find it difficult to adopt stringent, stable and credible climate policy. Climate policy is likely to be an object of political competition, making cross-part consensus difficult. Furthermore, competitive elections make it difficult for politicians to impose high, diffuse costs on consumers, while the presence of few veto players enables new governments to overturn previous policy commitments. These arguments are tested using new cross-national data on renewable energy policy, carbon taxes and energy taxes. Mixed methods are employed. Descriptive statistics and regression modelling establish correlations across the advanced democracies, while process tracing is used to identify causal mechanisms. By using climate change policy as a case to better understand long-term policymaking, this paper makes two important contributions. The first is to the nascent literature on long-term policymaking. Surprisingly little theoretical or empirical work has been done in this area. This paper contributes to both streams. Additionally, the paper contributes to the comparative political economy literature by showing how well-understood incentives and policymaking processes structure countries’ capacity to make policy for the future. Secondly, the paper builds a theory of the political economy of climate change policy. To date, we have no comprehensive theory that explains why some countries take action to address climate change, while others do not. This paper fills this gap and helps to explain why political action on climate change has been so frustratingly slow in many countries.