Representative democracy and climate change: do electoral institutions disincentivise politicians’ prioritisation of the issue?

Elected representatives’ failure to find and implement adequate responses to climate change threatens the legitimacy of representative democracies . Several academics and commentators alike understand the problem to be partly entrenched in the institution of representative democracy itself. Suffering from short-termism, representative democracy may, it has been argued, be ill-suited to ensure urgently needed policy actions aimed at mitigating the long-term consequences of climate change. Moreover, politicians may lack the electoral incentives to prioritise this issue because they face publics that dedicate only low levels of priority to climate change. While some authors thus advocate the idea that certain democratic freedoms and rights of citizens should be put on hold (e.g. Mittiga, 2021), others suggest that what is in fact needed is an extension of such freedoms and rights in more deliberative forms of democracy (e.g. citizen assemblies and mini publics) (e.g. Howarth et al., 2020). Yet despite this intellectually intriguing controversy, the evaluation of currently existing forms of representative democracy stands on shaky empirical foundations. Certainly, the climate action record of contemporary representative democracies appears unimpressive. However, little is known as to whether this is in fact systematically related to the built-in mechanisms of electoral accountability. The present paper addresses this imbalance in the literature by conducting a comparative study of politicians’ prioritisation/neglect of climate change as a policy issue in the German Bundestag and the British House of Commons in the period 2010-21. Based on a quantitative text analysis of legislative speeches and parliamentary questions, the study attempts to assess how politicians’ climate-related legislative behaviour is shaped by the intensity of their electoral accountability. Country-level differences in electoral systems, diachronic variation across electoral cycles, and individual-level differences in terms of seat marginality provide the opportunity to operationalise different aspects of electoral accountability and assess their effects on politicians’ climate-related behaviour. Based on these different indicators of legislative behaviour and electoral accountability, the paper offers an extensive empirical assessment of the link between representative democracy and politicians’ prioritisation/neglect of climate change as a policy issue. In doing so, the study seeks to provide a more informed basis for ongoing academic discussions of whether and how existing institutions of democratic governance need to change in order to bring about urgently needed climate action. References Howarth C, Bryant P, Corner A, et al. (2020) Building a Social Mandate for Climate Action: Lessons from COVID-19. Environmental and Resource Economics 76(4): 1107–1115. DOI: 10.1007/s10640-020-00446-9. Mittiga R (2021) Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change. American Political Science Review: 1–14. DOI: 10.1017/S0003055421001301.