Societal Conflicts and Efficient Climate Change Policy

Climate change is a major challenge for human society, although the successes in mitigating climate change are modest. This may be due to the fact that measures to combat climate change affect many areas that touch the foundations of (post-)industrial societies. This means that many interests of very different social actors are at stake. From a comparative perspective, we can see that in some countries are quite willing to tackle climate change, but that they are confronted with veto players that hinder major changes. Other countries are not very interested in taking far-reaching action against climate change. This means that we need to focus on two fundamental aspects in political science: the extent to which agenda setters incorporate environmental policy and the extent of societal conflict over environmental policy. The paper uses a new dataset on climate legislation that measures the intensity of climate policy over time (Jahn 2024). In order to capture the social conflict over climate policy, we firstly focus on the left-right dimension, which has taken very different forms in terms of the extent to which they support environmental concerns (Jahn 2022). The question here is whether we find noticeable effects on climate policy when left-right positions integrate environmental concerns to a greater extent. Secondly, it is also possible that a new divide has emerged in modern societies between ecological and productionist position or, thirdly, green-libertarian positions and New Right positions (GAL-TAN) (Marks et al. 2021) and, fourthly, the impact of populist parties in government (Jahn 2021). With regard to the social conflict over climate policy, the paper focuses on the disagreement between veto players and the role of corporatism. The veto player theorem (Tsebelis 2002) is a classic concept for measuring societal conflict in macro-comparative analysis. Particular attention is paid to incoherent governments in relation to their environmental positions. Incoherence is a measure of intra-party and intra-coalition conflicts (Jahn and Oberst 2012; Baltz 2023). Corporatism is a concept that has disappeared from many analyses in recent years, although it was an important explanatory variable in formative studies of environmental politics (Crepaz 1995; Scruggs 2003). However, in a more recent study, Jahn (2018) has shown that corporatism has different effects over time and in different countries. Furthermore, in many societies that have been particularly open to the environment, there has been a process of de-corporatism. If corporatism is defined as a form of social consensus-building (Lijphart 2012), this means that de-corporatism is associated with an increase in social conflict. What does this process then mean for environmental policy? The paper conducts a macro-comparative study of 30 countries over more than three decades. It therefore provides a general overview of the role of societal conflicts and the effectiveness of climate change policies. It is also possible that specific aspects receive special attention during the writing process. In this respect, the status of the paper is formative and will be further developed during the ECPR workshop. (References are missing because of word count).