ANR GREENVOTE

The Political Economy of Environmental Policies: a Socio-Cultural Approach

Last years have witnessed the rise of various citizens protest movements in the realm of environmental policy making. As highlighted by young people leading climate strikes around the world or the Yellow Vests in France, the rhetoric around global environmental issues such as climate change has involved a growing segment of the population. These new mobilization waves can lead to the dramatic failure of environmental policy as highlighted by the freezing of the French carbon tax after the yellow vests protest. In face of the urgency of implementing environmental policy to tackle with global environmental issues, it is crucial to understand how new citizens cleavages over environmental policy are formed and how they affect environmental policy choice.

Existing theories of the political economy of environmental policy point out the role of special interest groups (see Oates and Portney, 2003 for a survey). In special interest politics, lobbying groups compete to influence policy decisions by providing campaign contributions to their preferred candidate. Such models capture important aspects of the actual policy-making process regarding environmental issues (e.g., the choice of command-and-control instruments over more efficient incentive-based measures). Yet, this literature has neglected the importance of the divide between citizens for the political economy of climate policy. The standard economic approach suggests to focus on the unequal distribution of monetary costs and benefits or the uneven distribution of information and knowledge (e.g., individuals’ knowledge of climate change) to understand citizens' choice of environmental policy. However, the paradigm of self-interested materialistic preferences is inconsistent with different observations. There exists prominent examples of citizens voting against their own material interest. Hoschild (2018) describes what she calls the great paradox: rural Americans who suffer most from local environmental pollution are those who consistently vote against environmental regulation. In addition, more information about climate change does not necessarily translates into higher knowledge. While scientific evidence on the anthropogenic cause of climate change has accumulated (such that nowadays, 97 \% of climate scientists agree that human activities is responsible for climate change), in the US, the fraction of people believing that climate change is a natural phenomenon has remained stable over the last decades. Actually, this fraction has been rising among certain groups of the population as for individuals who identify with the Republican party. Even more surprising, contrary to what is predicted by rational information updating, among Republicans, individuals with higher education exhibit more climate skepticism.

In this research project we take these aspects on board by exploring the idea that heterogeneity in voters choices and attitudes reflects not only diverse material interests but also variations in psycho- social motivations. We argue that a promising way to understand those motivations is to adopt a social identity perspective where people sense of self is tied to the social groups to which they belong. With this approach, we aim to better grasp both how citizens cleavages are formed and how they affect environmental policy choice.