Abstract
This paper investigates how political elections influence environmental quality. From this perspective, we rely on the reward-punishment hypothesis (RPH) developed by democratic accountability theories. RPH implies that legislators can be held accountable by voters for increased pollution and/or environmental disasters. Consequently, incumbent politicians tend to limit environmental degradation during election campaigns because voters may switch their political preference as punishment for such degradations. Using a panel data set of 67 developed democracies over the period 2002–2015, our estimates reveal that the environmental quality tends to improve during the periods of legislative elections mainly in non-OECD countries. Such results provide evidence of the capacity of voters to influence incumbent politicians to embrace pro-environmental behavior as legislative elections approach.
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Notes
4% is the difference between 1 and the exponential coefficients of Legislative Elections and Legislative Electionst−1.
We are grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions in identifying those measures of environmental awareness.
In the case of missing data, the values reported for one wave were used for the missing periods.
We thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
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This study benefited from the financial support of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté Regional Council (DEFI-ENV project).
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Stef, N., Ben Jabeur, S. Elections and Environmental Quality. Environ Resource Econ 84, 593–625 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-022-00739-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-022-00739-1