Climate Politics in Hard Times: How Local Economic Shocks Influence MPs Attention to Climate Change
Published in European Journal of Political Research, 2020
Recommended citation: Henning Finseraas, Bjørn Høyland and Martin G. Søyland (forthcoming)." Climate Politics in Hard Times: How Local Economic Shocks Influence MPs Attention to Climate Change " European Journal of Political Research .
Most countries struggle to implement CO2 reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and MPs handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment re- sponded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil-price drop between parliamentary ses- sions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in Green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a “window of opportunity” for advocates of the “Green shift”.