Tilting for or at Windmills? The Impact of the Construction of Wind Turbines on AfD and Green Electoral Success

The increased salience of environmental issues, first and foremost global warming, is one of the key developments of (North-)Western European public opinion and party politics at the turn of the century. This has gone together with public and private investments in sustainable, i.e. non-carbon, energy production. Many such projects are controversially discussed, in particular wind turbines. On the one hand, most people generally favor the transition to renewable energy, on the other hand, wind turbines in the own neighborhood are frowned upon. For this reason, the proposed paper seeks to analyze the impact of the establishment of wind turbines on voting behavior and asks: What’s the relationship between the construction of wind turbines and voting behavior? Do the Greens benefit from the spread of wind turbines or does the revolution eat its own children? How does the presence of wind turbines affect the electoral success of their biggest opponents, the radical right? Drawing on a novel dataset we investigate the impact of the construction of wind turbines on Green party and AfD vote shares in German municipalities. Employing a difference-in-difference design, where the construction of wind turbines functions as treatment, we test their effect on the electoral success of the two most outspoken political players, AfD and the Greens. Our results have important implications for the understanding of the ever-more polarized debate on the transformation of the carbon economy under the condition of electoral politics.