Leading or Lagging? Transnational Lobbying and Domestic Climate Policy Change

• In Event: New Approaches to Environmental Policy Research

Abstract

Why do interest groups mobilize globally? Currently two main explanations have been put forward. The first – the pro-active hypothesis – states that interest groups seek to influence global policies or mobilize global actors to push national legislation in the preferred direction. The second – the reactive hypothesis – states that interest groups mobilize globally to level the playing field at a global scale. In this view, interest groups do not seek to change domestic legislation, but hope to push other governments to adopt similar policies. In this paper we, first, seek to analyse which of these two hypotheses holds more explanatory power. Second, we aim to identify the conditions under which either the first or the second motivation is more likely to drive global advocacy. Addressing these questions is important in order to understand better both patterns of global advocacy and what can be expected from these developments in terms of policy consequences. Our empirical analysis focusses on climate change policies. To test our hypotheses, we rely on a novel database of climate change mobilization by interest groups across the globe and over time (1997-2018). This data contains all national organizations that mobilized at the annual UN climate summits (more than 6,300 organizations). We combine this with data on the adoption of national climate legislation during the same period. Through Vector Automated Regression models, we identify whether interest group mobilization mostly precedes or follows the adoption of national climate legislation. This allows us to see whether, and under what conditions, interest groups mobilize pro-actively or reactively at the global level in reference to domestic policy.

Authors

• Marcel Hanegraaff

• Kai Schulze, Technical University of Darmstadt