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Green electoral performance and national climate change commitment

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View the page of Liam Clegg

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Drawing on a new OECD database on climate change outlays, Liam Clegg probes indirect influence from Green electoral success as mediated by inter-party competition, and direct mechanisms of influence from elected Green representatives.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 20, 2024

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This video video is a detailed discussion on the relationship between green parties' electoral performance and national commitments to climate change action, based on newly available OECD data on climate change spending. The speaker is interested in understanding how different actors, including market and political entities, are committed to combatting climate change.

The conversation highlights that climate change leadership is crucial due to ongoing global negotiations, and it reflects on the challenges of measuring this leadership. It identifies three main strands of scholarship that address climate change leadership: (1) political statements and manifesto content from political actors, (2) expert assessments of national policy frameworks, and (3) direct policy outcomes on the ground.

The speaker outlines hypotheses regarding how green parties impact climate change commitments, proposing direct mechanisms (green party presence in coalition governments and legislatures) and an indirect mechanism (inter-party competition). The findings reveal that green parties in coalition governments lead to increased climate-related spending, while strong electoral performances by green parties can compel governing parties to enhance their climate action to attract environmentally motivated voters.

Key insights from the data analysis indicate that coalition presence significantly affects climate spending, suggesting that green parties can negotiate effectively for climate-related expenditures. However, the mere presence of green parties in legislative chambers does not correlate to increased spending. Additionally, the study suggests that there are no "wasted votes" for greens, as their electoral success can influence broader government actions and climate commitments. Overall, the speaker emphasizes the importance of green parties in shaping national climate commitments, including the influence of coalition partnerships and competitive political dynamics.

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I've become increasingly interested in trying to explain

00:04.595 --> 00:08.785
variation in, various types

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of actors commitment to, to climate change action.

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Um, so market actors, political actors,

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and as I'm sure I'll talk more about,

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later on in our conversation today, one

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of the direct reasons for getting involved in this paper,

00:25.085 --> 00:28.505
was, was simply stumbling across a new data set

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and, finding that the OECD had very recently,

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released a new, a new data set on,

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national level climate change, spending.

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And yeah, this, this data that gives you a key

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with which you can try and say something, significant

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and, and new about an important topic.

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There is quite a, developed body of scholarship that's,

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that's interested in this topic

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of climate change leadership.

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What factors, impact upon,

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particularly national level climate change leadership?

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Right. It's a clearly intrinsically really important topic.

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You know, we every, year have got the COP negotiations.

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We see new commitments being made.

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We see, global leaders are keen

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to appear like they are climate, climate change leaders.

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And the challenge that we have, as analysts

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of climate change leadership

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and climate change politics is it's this question of

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how do we gain analytic traction over,

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this thing called climate change leadership, right?

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How do we measure it and how do we then kind of probe,

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variation in, in patterns of, of leadership

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and performance effectiveness?

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And if we look at existing scholarship, we see

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that there are maybe kind of three approaches to,

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to trying to gain traction over climate leadership.

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We firstly have a strand of scholarship that's interested in

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what, political actors say, right?

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You get scholarship that focuses on, in particular,

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manifesto content, right?

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So, former colleague here at York,

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Faye Farad has done a lot of work on

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climate change related focuses in, national manifestos,

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looks at some of the kind of party political

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dynamics that shape that.

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So that's strand number one.

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Strand number two is scholarship that focuses on, on,

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expert assessments of,

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of national policy frameworks, national policy positions.

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Uh, so, you know, for example, we've got German watch,

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climate Change Performance Index gives you this, this,

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table of national leadership based upon expert assessment

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of, climate change policy frameworks.

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Um, again, former colleague here, Paul Tobin,

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has done some really interesting work using

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that metric. And

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Then we have a look at, we have a third collection

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of scholarship that, that looks, kind of directly at

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policy, outcomes

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or a, direct out outputs on the ground.

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So, you know, for example, we've got, ye mayors,

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well-known paper that looks at the relationship between,

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party politics

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and levels of, of, of emissions of,

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carbon emissions, like in particular, urban spaces.

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So really developed literature, big challenge about

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how do we gain analytic traction over it.

03:34.785 --> 03:38.605
But across this literature, what we get

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is a consistent message that

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party politics seems to matter.

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Some studies suggest to us that the, left

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oriented parties tend to be, performing more strongly.

03:54.035 --> 03:58.285
Some studies give us insights into specifically the role of,

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green parties and green electoral performance in,

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in shaping, in shaping climate change leadership.

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And in our paper, like I say, when, when we,

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found this, this newly released database

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that gives us this, really nice measure of,

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of climate change leadership that is comparable across

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a large period of time, large number of,

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of nation states, what we really wanted to do was

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to add a bit of value to, while understanding in general of,

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of the role that party politics plays,

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but specifically to hook into, green party politics

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and to, yeah, just understand the way in which directly

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and indirectly, green party actors have, have been able

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to shape, national level commitment to climate change.

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So in terms of hypotheses, so from existing scholarship,

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we pick out three potential pathways

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through which we think green party

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electoral performance in one way

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or another might be shaping national level

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climate change commitment.

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So first of all, we have got direct mechanisms of influence.

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So we hypothesize that where you have,

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green party representation in a national coalition.

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So when, when there are green ministers,

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within a national coalition government, we, we suggest

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that you should expect to see that boost

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to climate change commitment.

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We say also that where you have green party,

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legislative presence, presence,

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so when there are green mps sitting in a chamber,

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you should expect to see, enhanced,

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climate change leadership enhanced

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commitment to climate change.

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So they are the two direct measures of influence

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that we hypothesize, may well exist

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and we seek to test for.

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And then in terms of a, a third mechanism of,

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of green influence, we pick out an indirect measure.

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Um, so we identify inter-party competition

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as being a potential, third pathway of influence.

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So through this third pathway, what we expect is that

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where you have, green electoral success in a given

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national election, we expect governing parties to respond

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to this, success

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by themselves undertaking accelerated,

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climate change action.

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The idea behind it being,

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the green electoral success has demonstrated

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that there's this pool of environmentally motivated voters

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and, the, the, the national governing party,

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will be keen to, to capture, some

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of these environmentally motivated voters.

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So we say, overall across our hypotheses

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that there are these three pathways of influence,

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to direct involving green party actors, taking action

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to try and push forward, climate change leadership.

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And the third one, relying on this indirect mechanism,

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relying on other parties responding,

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to their own electoral success, how do we test it?

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Like I say, we were lucky to, to, find this,

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OECD say dataset on what they refer to

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as climate change significant spending.

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So the OECD, borrowed the eus,

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climate Change tax taxonomy,

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and the an OECD team went

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through the huge database, time series database

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that they have on lines

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of expenditure from their government, member states

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and yeah, identified lines of expenditure that fitted

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with the EU taxonomy, on climate spending.

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And, they were able to create this database that runs,

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I think from, it starts in 2001.

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Um, the version that we use in the paper runs up to 2019,

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and that provides us with the core measure.

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Um, and under this core measure, you know, we see

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that average spending of this type,

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is in the region of about 1%, of GDP,

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across, across OECD member states on average.

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And,

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and we try to explain variation in,

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in this level of, of climate change expenditure,

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by plugging in a range of control variables that,

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that we think, might impact on,

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on national level aggregate commitment.

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Um, but then, yeah, in terms of the, the variables of,

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the independent variables of primary interest,

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we construct fairly simple measures

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of green coalition presence of the existence

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of greens within, legislative chambers

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and, measures of overall green,

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electoral performance.

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So it's, it's, it's always nice when you can create a model

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that relies on quite, simple and intuitive inputs.

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And, and that's what we've been able to do.

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Yeah, we, we effectively deploy,

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deploy some time series re regression analysis,

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to generate the results that we generate.

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Headline insights that we generate.

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Headline insight number one is

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that we do find this significant effect,

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from green coalition presence.

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So headline terms, where you have,

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a green party taking part in a,

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in a national government coalition, you see a boost to,

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this measure of, of climate change expenditure.

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And you see that overall this coalition effect

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raises, national level climate spending

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by something in the region of 0.07%

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of GDP, right?

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So in proportionate terms, it's low,

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but in terms of, nominal values,

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this is, this is a big value.

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So that's headline finding number one,

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headline finding Number two is that we find,

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conditional evidence

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of this inter-party competition effect, right?

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And what we find specifically is that within

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European Union member states, of the OECD, you have,

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you have green strong electoral performance

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leading, governing parties to,

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ramp up their green expenditure, right?

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Underlying causal pathway there being about trying

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to capture these newly revealed pools of,

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of environmentally motivated voters.

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So we see a straightforward, coalition effect.

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We see a moderated version

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of this inter-party competition effect.

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Um, and, and they are the headline findings, right?

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We find, we find no evidence of an underlying,

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legislative effect, right?

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So simply having greens

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within the legislative chamber seems not to be affected,

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not to be associated with an increase in

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climate change expenditure.

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Um, but yeah, they are, they are the core headline,

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headline insights that we generate.

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And I, I hope that one of the nice things about the paper is

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that the hypotheses are so tightly linked to

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causal pathways, right? The

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Hypothesis effectively is a hypothesis

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of an underlying causal pathway that, you know, we can,

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we can say, we can say something quite meaningful about

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what has driven, these particular forms of variation,

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in terms of coalition presence into party competition.

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Um, and yeah, so they are,

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they are the headline findings in terms of implication,

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I would say that number one,

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we are shown the green parties

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have some significant pathways to influence in terms

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of national level, climate change commitment, right?

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So number one, really significant evidence of

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meaningful impact from coalition partnership, right?

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We can be, more confident than previously that

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that green party coalition partners are effective

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negotiators when setting the terms of,

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a coalition partnership that they're entering into, right?

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We see that, that they seem to be able to extract

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higher levels of expenditure, in relation

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to their preferred areas, right?

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So head dial headline message number one is that, we,

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we get a confirmation of these, pathways for influence,

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and we also see that,

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we also see that there's perhaps not such a thing

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as a wasted green vote, right?

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In elections. So one of the barriers,

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to many people voting green is, is this perception

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that you are throwing your vote away, right?

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Greens aren't gonna be the party of government.

13:33.635 --> 13:36.735
Uh, what are we doing supporting them by finding

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specifically this inter-party competition effect.

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This suggestion that green electoral success leads

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to changed behavior from other parties,

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particularly from the government governing party.

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This shows that the votes, behind greens,

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like can have a significant influence even

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where they're not being translated into direct,

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political, political power for greens, right?

14:04.515 --> 14:07.335
So, the coalition presence matters.

14:07.675 --> 14:10.735
The inter-party competition, mechanism matters

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and what we see, yeah, ultimately is that, is that arguably,

14:16.115 --> 14:19.975
there's, there's no such thing as a, a wasted green vote

14:20.235 --> 14:23.175
or certainly the danger of having a wasted,

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green vote isn't as acute

14:25.395 --> 14:27.175
as we might have previously thought.

00:00 - I've become increasingly interested in trying to explain variation in, various types of actors commitment to, to climate change action. so market actors, political actors, and as I'm sure I'll talk more about, later on in our conversation today, one

00:21 - of the direct reasons for getting involved in this paper, was, was simply stumbling across a new data set and, finding that the OECD had very recently, released a new, a new data set on, national level climate change, spending. And yeah, this, this data that gives you a key with which you can try and say something, significant and, and new about an important topic. There is quite a, developed body of scholarship that's, that's interested in this topic

00:55 - of climate change leadership. What factors, impact upon, particularly national level climate change leadership? Right. It's a clearly intrinsically really important topic. You know, we every, year have got the COP negotiations. We see new commitments being made. We see, global leaders are keen to appear like they are climate, climate change leaders. And the challenge that we have, as analysts of climate change leadership

01:27 - and climate change politics is it's this question of how do we gain analytic traction over, this thing called climate change leadership, right? How do we measure it and how do we then kind of probe, variation in, in patterns of, of leadership and performance effectiveness? And if we look at existing scholarship, we see that there are maybe kind of three approaches to, to trying to gain traction over climate leadership. We firstly have a strand of scholarship that's interested in

02:00 - what, political actors say, right? You get scholarship that focuses on, in particular, manifesto content, right? So, former colleague here at York, Faye Farad has done a lot of work on climate change related focuses in, national manifestos, looks at some of the kind of party political dynamics that shape that. So that's strand number one. Strand number two is scholarship that focuses on, on,

02:30 - expert assessments of, of national policy frameworks, national policy positions. so, you know, for example, we've got German watch, climate Change Performance Index gives you this, this, table of national leadership based upon expert assessment of, climate change policy frameworks. again, former colleague here, Paul Tobin, has done some really interesting work using that metric. And Then we have a look at, we have a third collection

03:01 - of scholarship that, that looks, kind of directly at policy, outcomes or a, direct out outputs on the ground. So, you know, for example, we've got, ye mayors, well-known paper that looks at the relationship between, party politics and levels of, of, of emissions of, carbon emissions, like in particular, urban spaces. So really developed literature, big challenge about how do we gain analytic traction over it.

03:34 - But across this literature, what we get is a consistent message that party politics seems to matter. Some studies suggest to us that the, left oriented parties tend to be, performing more strongly. Some studies give us insights into specifically the role of, green parties and green electoral performance in, in shaping, in shaping climate change leadership. And in our paper, like I say, when, when we, found this, this newly released database

04:15 - that gives us this, really nice measure of, of climate change leadership that is comparable across a large period of time, large number of, of nation states, what we really wanted to do was to add a bit of value to, while understanding in general of, of the role that party politics plays, but specifically to hook into, green party politics and to, yeah, just understand the way in which directly and indirectly, green party actors have, have been able to shape, national level commitment to climate change.

04:49 - So in terms of hypotheses, so from existing scholarship, we pick out three potential pathways through which we think green party electoral performance in one way or another might be shaping national level climate change commitment. So first of all, we have got direct mechanisms of influence. So we hypothesize that where you have, green party representation in a national coalition. So when, when there are green ministers,

05:23 - within a national coalition government, we, we suggest that you should expect to see that boost to climate change commitment. We say also that where you have green party, legislative presence, presence, so when there are green mps sitting in a chamber, you should expect to see, enhanced, climate change leadership enhanced commitment to climate change. So they are the two direct measures of influence

05:52 - that we hypothesize, may well exist and we seek to test for. And then in terms of a, a third mechanism of, of green influence, we pick out an indirect measure. so we identify inter-party competition as being a potential, third pathway of influence. So through this third pathway, what we expect is that where you have, green electoral success in a given national election, we expect governing parties to respond to this, success

06:30 - by themselves undertaking accelerated, climate change action. The idea behind it being, the green electoral success has demonstrated that there's this pool of environmentally motivated voters and, the, the, the national governing party, will be keen to, to capture, some of these environmentally motivated voters. So we say, overall across our hypotheses that there are these three pathways of influence,

07:03 - to direct involving green party actors, taking action to try and push forward, climate change leadership. And the third one, relying on this indirect mechanism, relying on other parties responding, to their own electoral success, how do we test it? Like I say, we were lucky to, to, find this, OECD say dataset on what they refer to as climate change significant spending. So the OECD, borrowed the eus, climate Change tax taxonomy,

07:40 - and the an OECD team went through the huge database, time series database that they have on lines of expenditure from their government, member states and yeah, identified lines of expenditure that fitted with the EU taxonomy, on climate spending. And, they were able to create this database that runs, I think from, it starts in 2001. the version that we use in the paper runs up to 2019, and that provides us with the core measure.

08:18 - and under this core measure, you know, we see that average spending of this type, is in the region of about 1%, of GDP, across, across OECD member states on average. And, and we try to explain variation in, in this level of, of climate change expenditure, by plugging in a range of control variables that, that we think, might impact on, on national level aggregate commitment.

08:55 - but then, yeah, in terms of the, the variables of, the independent variables of primary interest, we construct fairly simple measures of green coalition presence of the existence of greens within, legislative chambers and, measures of overall green, electoral performance. So it's, it's, it's always nice when you can create a model that relies on quite, simple and intuitive inputs. And, and that's what we've been able to do.

09:27 - Yeah, we, we effectively deploy, deploy some time series re regression analysis, to generate the results that we generate. Headline insights that we generate. Headline insight number one is that we do find this significant effect, from green coalition presence. So headline terms, where you have, a green party taking part in a, in a national government coalition, you see a boost to,

09:58 - this measure of, of climate change expenditure. And you see that overall this coalition effect raises, national level climate spending by something in the region of 0.07% of GDP, right? So in proportionate terms, it's low, but in terms of, nominal values, this is, this is a big value. So that's headline finding number one, headline finding Number two is that we find,

10:29 - conditional evidence of this inter-party competition effect, right? And what we find specifically is that within European Union member states, of the OECD, you have, you have green strong electoral performance leading, governing parties to, ramp up their green expenditure, right? Underlying causal pathway there being about trying to capture these newly revealed pools of, of environmentally motivated voters.

11:03 - So we see a straightforward, coalition effect. We see a moderated version of this inter-party competition effect. and, and they are the headline findings, right? We find, we find no evidence of an underlying, legislative effect, right? So simply having greens within the legislative chamber seems not to be affected, not to be associated with an increase in climate change expenditure.

11:35 - but yeah, they are, they are the core headline, headline insights that we generate. And I, I hope that one of the nice things about the paper is that the hypotheses are so tightly linked to causal pathways, right? The Hypothesis effectively is a hypothesis of an underlying causal pathway that, you know, we can, we can say, we can say something quite meaningful about what has driven, these particular forms of variation, in terms of coalition presence into party competition.

12:10 - and yeah, so they are, they are the headline findings in terms of implication, I would say that number one, we are shown the green parties have some significant pathways to influence in terms of national level, climate change commitment, right? So number one, really significant evidence of meaningful impact from coalition partnership, right? We can be, more confident than previously that that green party coalition partners are effective

12:46 - negotiators when setting the terms of, a coalition partnership that they're entering into, right? We see that, that they seem to be able to extract higher levels of expenditure, in relation to their preferred areas, right? So head dial headline message number one is that, we, we get a confirmation of these, pathways for influence, and we also see that, we also see that there's perhaps not such a thing as a wasted green vote, right?

13:22 - In elections. So one of the barriers, to many people voting green is, is this perception that you are throwing your vote away, right? Greens aren't gonna be the party of government. what are we doing supporting them by finding specifically this inter-party competition effect. This suggestion that green electoral success leads to changed behavior from other parties, particularly from the government governing party. This shows that the votes, behind greens,

13:55 - like can have a significant influence even where they're not being translated into direct, political, political power for greens, right? So, the coalition presence matters. The inter-party competition, mechanism matters and what we see, yeah, ultimately is that, is that arguably, there's, there's no such thing as a, a wasted green vote or certainly the danger of having a wasted, green vote isn't as acute as we might have previously thought.

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