The Determinants of Popular Support for Environmental Policy in India

• In Event: Environmental Politics in Developing Countries and Marginalized Societies

Abstract

Environmental pollution is endemic in countries undergoing rapid economic growth, adversely affecting health and productivity, and contributing to long-term climate change trends. Yet, in developing democracies, political action to combat deficient air and water quality and to implement pro-environmental policy initiatives is minimal. We hypothesize that one explanation for this failure to act lies in the structure of political competition in developing democracies. When politicians and voters are enmeshed in clientelistic relationships that are organized along co-ethnic lines, voters are predicted to have preferences for policy action regarding common good problems like environmental pollution that vary according to the ethnic profiles of their representatives. Differences in expectations of group-wise benefits from policy measures are anticipated to inhibit mass mobilization on the environment. We conduct a large-scale survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of citizens in India to probe our theoretical conjectures regarding the determinants of political mobilization on environmental policy. India is among the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, remains extremely vulnerable to climate change, and has in recent decades registered dangerously high levels of environmental pollution, but has yet to experience widespread political mobilization on environmental issues (Prabhu 2011). Our survey experiment probes the determinants of this political inaction. We randomize the attributes of an anti-pollution policy being advanced by a political candidate, and measure respondents’ support for the policy. Two main findings emerge. First, citizens are highly sensitive to the economic costs of policies designed to combat pollution. Second, clientelistic expectations moderate support for the environmental policy. Policies built around clientelistic transfers are preferred to programmatic regulatory policies when proposed by co-ethnic politicians. Meanwhile, programmatic policies are preferred when proposed by non-co-ethnic politicians. The results suggest that voters routinely fail to vote to enact environmental policies whose benefits will be experienced primarily by ethnic out-groups. Our study illustrates how clientelism interacts with ethnic voting to thwart political inaction on environmental policy in divided democracies.

Authors

• Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University

• Gareth Nellis, University of California, San Diego

• Steven I. Wilkinson, Yale University