Diffuse benefits and concentrated costs: how local opposition to environmental protectionism is fuelling a new centre-periphery divide in Western Europe

Christoph Arndt, University of Reading Daphne Halikiopoulou, University of Reading Christos Vrakopoulos, University of Leeds How do environmental protectionism and climate change policies impact on electoral politics? Offering one of the first comprehensive comparative studies of how climate change policies might affect voting behaviour, this article argues that local opposition to specific climate change measures is key to understanding the emergence of a rural- urban cleavage in Western Europe. Using the European Social Survey’s (ESS) Module “Public Attitudes to Climate Change” and the Eurobarometer 91.5 we develop and test a range of hypotheses about the ways in which local and concentrated resistance to climate change measures may be channelled into electoral behaviour. Specifically, we theorise climate change as a collective action problem with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs. Climate policies can impose costs on local communities and socially defined groups through job losses, regressive income effects and negative externalities thus fuelling localised opposition from those areas that are incurring these costs. This, in turn, feeds into voting behaviour, reinforcing territorial cleavages and potentially leading to accountability failures or the rise of populist parties. We apply a series of multilevel logit models to inspect how climate concerns have affected voting in National Elections by 2016 and the 2019 European Parliament Elections. Our results support our argument that backlash against environmental protectionism is triggered at the local level by the potential ‘losers’ of these processes. This backlash is key to understanding emerging centre-periphery divides and new political alliances where populist right-wing parties increasingly align with the periphery and the country-side and green parties with the metropolitan centres as witnessed in the elections we cover in our dataset. Hence, the division between far right and greens parties has also increasingly built up a geographical anchor. Our argument highlights the importance of green attitudes for the emergence of societal cleavages and has significant policy implications. To be politically successful, environmental policies need to align private and social benefits. If we are right, the consequences of local resistance can be detrimental for political stability.