Stakeholder Pressure and Voting on Climate Change Mitigation in the Ninth European Parliament

Recently, the European Commission has initiated a considerable number of proposals to mitigate climate change, most notably linked to the European Green Deal (Von Homeyer et al. 2021, "EU climate and energy…"). This has sparked political conflict, since de-carbonization policies often imply imposing uneven short-run costs, disproportionately affecting specific domestic groups, such as firms and workers in energy-intensive industries and agriculture or working-class households (Colantone et al. 2023, ‘The Political Consequences of Green Policies’). Hence, resistance and counter-lobbying may come from both business associations and trade unions (Mildenberger 2020, "Carbon captured"). Re-election-minded politicians may be reluctant to support de-carbonization policies because of lobby or because they expect electoral costs resulting from negative impacts on their constituencies (Cragg et al. 2013, "Carbon geography"). However, such distributional conflicts characterizing the green transition are embedded in the wider institutional and political context (Breetz et al. 2018, "The political logics…"). On the one hand, electoral system features, politicization strategies and the degree of competition from radical parties can magnify stakeholder pressure. On the other hand, compensation mechanisms may alleviate negative consequences of policy changes and provide a buffer against electoral sanctioning (Meckling et al. 2022, "Why nations lead or lag"). The European Parliament is an excellent setting for examining the legislative politics of de-carbonization as it allows to track how MEPs from a large variety of national political backgrounds (and even different sub-national electoral districts) vote on the same proposals. Our study examines individual choices in roll-call votes on key European Green Deal policies from the Ninth European Parliament. We match data on party positions, MEP and district characteristics and geo-coded greenhouse gas emissions (Crippa et al. 2018, "Gridded emissions…") in extended spatial models of parliamentary voting. The results contribute to our understanding of the EU politics of climate change and its domestic underpinnings.