Climate Change Politics: The View from Junior Scholars

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Climate change is one of the most significant policy problems facing governments and an area of rich scholarship in political science. Indeed, research on the politics of climate change is advancing steadily. A key group leading this effort are junior scholars working across a range of political science subfields, theoretical approaches, methods, and geographies. This panel showcases their work by bringing together a diverse group of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. The goal is to highlight the contributions of this next generation of researchers; putting them in dialogue with one another and getting their perspective on key questions for future study.

Andrews and co-authors use lab experiments to examine individual-level moral hazard in the case of geoengineering policy. Geoengineering is often touted as a solution to climate change. However, if citizens believe that moon-shot efforts to engineer ourselves out of the problem will ultimately succeed, they may have little incentive to support more piecemeal, yet necessary, mitigation efforts. The authors find that the anticipation of moral hazard, rather than moral hazard itself, undermines support for mitigation policy.

Finnegan and Meckling focus on firms, asking why some businesses might be willing to absorb the short-term costs of government action on climate change, while some fight it. Examining the role of institutions, they theorize that corporate governance institutions, especially ownership structure, influence companies’ time horizons, and by extension their focus on short- vs long- term business goals, which in turn shapes their political incentives to support stringent climate policy or oppose it. The arguments are tested using newly available firm-level policy preferences and a constructed measure of firm-level temporal preferences.

Lerner investigates local climate politics, examining how interactions between local governments and wind developers, as well as the actions of neighboring jurisdictions, inform the adoption and design of rules for siting commercial wind farms. Analyzing data from 1,603 counties in 23 states, Lerner finds that local policymakers are more likely to enact wind ordinances when they have a higher probability of experience with wind developers and when neighboring counties have adopted wind ordinances or approved the construction of wind farms.

Lastly, Ratan explores renewable energy politics in developing countries by investigating the political sources of variation in feed in tariffs (FiTs) ability to attract investment. Focusing on the ways that domestic energy institutions and policy design mitigate political risk for investors, Ratan finds that countries with competitive energy markets, independent regulatory agencies, and risk mitigating design attributes attract higher levels of renewable energy investment. The results highlight how the domestic policy implementation context shapes policy outcomes via its effects on risk-avoidant foreign investors.

Sub Unit

• Division 39: Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics

Individual Presentations

• Anticipating Possible Moral Hazards Undermines Climate Change Mitigation - Talbot M Andrews, University of Connecticut; Andrew Delton, Stony Brook University; Reuben Kline, SUNY, Stony Brook University

• Corporate Governance, Time Horizons, and the Climate Policy Preferences of Firms - Jared J Finnegan, University College London; Jonas Meckling, University of California, Berkeley

• Local Power: Understanding the Adoption of County Wind Energy Regulation - Michael Henry Lerner, London School of Economics

• One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Feed in Tariff Design in Developing Countries - Ishana Ratan, University of California, Berkeley

Chair

• Jennifer Hadden University of Maryland, College Park

Discussants

• Michael Aklin University of Pittsburgh

• David Konisky Indiana University, Bloomington