Public opinion and environmental policy output: a cross-national analysis of energy policies in Europe
By Brilé Anderson, Tobias Böhmelt, Hugh Ward. 2017
209 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article studies how public opinion is associated with the introduction of renewable energy policies in Europe. While research increasingly seeks to model the link between public opinion and environmental policies, the empirical evidence is largely based on a single case: the US. This limits the generalizability of findings and we argue accordingly for a systematic, quantitative study of how public opinion drives environmental policies in another context. Theoretically, we combine arguments behind the political survival of democratic leaders with electoral success and environmental politics. Ultimately, we suggest that office-seeking leaders introduce policies that seem favorable to the domestic audience; if the public prefers environmental protection, the government introduces such policies in turn. The main contribution of this research is the cross-country empirical analysis, where we combine data on the public’s environmental attitudes and renewable energy policy outputs in a European context between 1974 and 2015. We show that as public opinion shifts towards prioritizing the environment, there is a significant and positive effect on the rate of renewable energy policy outputs by governments in Europe. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic, quantitative study of public opinion and environmental policies across a large set of countries, and we demonstrate that the mechanisms behind the introduction of renewable energy policies follow major trends across European states.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbdc0448592c86679ab88e8e4eb52c03b7ec0b78
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Political Science and International Relations
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Perceived fairness and public acceptability of carbon pricing: a review of the literature (2019, background): “Accounting for people’s opinions and public acceptability of climate change policies is important as these affect political choices (Dresner et al., 2006a; Anderson et al., 2017).”