With Their Hands Tied? - Political Strategies to Implement Divisive Environmental Policies

Divisive policies are necessary to solve climate change. One reason for the lack of action is that politicians are afraid that implementing forceful policies will lead to electoral punishment in the next election. Some groups punish politicians for climate initiatives, while a small but growing voter group rewards forceful policies. Politicians therefore try to assess their prospective support, and whether it is possible to sway voter groups and avoid electoral punishment. One way to sway negative attitudes caused by divisive policy-decisions is to use compensatory measures. Lab and survey experiments has shown that one of the main reasons why people dislike certain policies is because they are perceived to have an unfair distribution of costs and burdens. But how politicians talk about compensation, who they target, and what effect it has on public support is unclear. Compensating is known to mitigate drops in public support when introducing divisive change, such as welfare retrenchment (Häusermann, Kurer, and Traber 2019). Examples in the environmental field include a study of the city of Milan’s ban on polluting cars found that individuals who received municipal compensation were not more likely to vote for the political opposition (Colantone et al. 2023). Similarly, the Canadian carbon tax includes a compensation to reduce negative distributional effects, pointing to compensatory mechanisms as a strategy to enhance public acceptance of carbon taxes (Mildenberger et al. 2022). Knowing the relative effect of these strategies matters when governments are using bans, subsidies, and investments when introducing energy policies (IEA 2024). Politicians may target individuals, households, businesses, entire industries, and regions. These measures can take many forms, including: 1) Direct cash transfers or rebates, 2) Subsidies or tax breaks for cleaner alternatives (e.g., wind energy, heat pumps, or electric vehicles), 3) Debt relief or low-interest loans for energy efficiency retrofits, or 4) Payments to phase out banned technologies (e.g., coal power, oil boilers, wood stoves). We develop and test the effect of these compensating strategies on public support We use times-series data of politicians’ parliamentary speeches in the United Kingdom (ParlaMint), using a dictionary approach to label and extract speeches on climate and energy. Then, we trained ChatGPT 4.o to label targets and types of compensation. Finally, we combine the timing of expressed strategies with citizen’s vote choice data from the BES Panel. The research design allows us to test the effect of politicians’ strategies on vote choice using regression analysis. We advance the theoretical mechanisms used by politicians. 1) We develop empirical approaches of measuring the mechanisms by using large language models to capture politicians’ compensatory strategies in their speeches and their electoral outcomes. 2) We speak to the possibilities of answering the increasing calls for political leadership to address the major global challenges of our time. 3) We also address the classical criticism of whether representative democracy and the pursuit of re-election is compatible with solving pressing societal questions, such as climate change, which require longer time-horizons for decision-making.