Success Against the Odds: Explaining Solar Expansion Under Populist Local Leadership in Switzerland

The expansion of renewable energy has become a focal point of climate governance, requiring vertical coordination across multiple levels of government. While national frameworks and international agreements set ambitious climate targets, their actual success depends on effective local implementation. Municipalities, in particular, are key actors that can either facilitate or obstruct the installation of renewable infrastructure such as solar panels. Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of local political actors—particularly those critical of environmental policy—in shaping energy transitions. In particular, right-wing populist party (RWPP)-led municipalities appear to resist or delay renewable infrastructure. An initial analysis of Swiss data confirms this trend for large-scale PV installations (≥100 kW), but not for smaller, standardized systems. The question then is, Why did some RWPP-led municipalities succeed in expanding solar infrastructure? In other words, under what conditions is energy transition possible despite political constraints? Understanding this dynamic can provide critical insights into how local resistance might be mitigated and how democratic yet effective models of climate governance can be built at the subnational level. To address this question, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach, focusing on RWPP-led municipalities in Switzerland between 2018 and 2025. First, Mahalanobis distance matching is used to identify municipalities with similar characteristics based on the following variables: RWPP mayoral leadership, public support for energy policy (via referenda), RWPP vote share, agricultural share, income levels, solar insolation, population density, municipality type, and population size. Within each matched group, municipalities with the highest values of (a) large-scale PV installations or (b) rooftop PV potential utilization are selected. This allows for the identification of positive deviant cases, municipalities that succeeded under otherwise constraining conditions. These municipalities then become the focus of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders such as local energy officials, urban planners, and elected representatives. Supplementary materials—including local media reports, policy documents, and municipal protocols—are used where available. The goal is to uncover the mechanisms that enabled solar expansion under RWPP governance, such as the presence of energy cooperatives, local entrepreneurs, strategically reframed narratives, inter-municipal influence, or material incentives. These mechanisms are contrasted with matched municipalities that did not achieve comparable outcomes. Through this analysis, the study seeks to identify and theorize the specific institutional contexts and actor configurations that enabled solar expansion under political constraint. This research makes three contributions. First, it shows that populist leadership does not always determine renewable energy outcomes in a linear way. Second, it contributes to understanding how Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) dynamics in RWPP-leaning rural communities—often presumed resistant to energy transitions—can be strategically mitigated, revealing positive deviant cases that challenge dominant assumptions in the field. Third, it contributes to understanding how ideologically polarized contexts might still achieve effective and legitimate energy transitions.