Quick and dirty: how populist parties in government affect greenhouse gas emissions in EU member states

ABSTRACT

Populist parties are on the rise. But what happens when they are in government? In order to grasp the effect of populist parties in government systematically, the paper includes all 28 EU member states in an analysis which estimates the effect of populist parties in power on the increase of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The results show that depending on their ideological orientation populist government participation is clearly associated with increasing GHG emissions. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the effect is quick. This is above all true for right-wing populist parties in government. Furthermore, the analysis shows that populist parties have different impacts in various regions of the EU. While right-wing populist governments are associated with an increase of GHG emissions in North Western and Eastern Europe, left-wing populist governments in Southern Europe have the opposite effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• European Union
• partisan theory
• populist parties
• post-factual communication
• socio-political divisions

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the GOVTRAN International Workshop on ‘Climate and Energy Governance and the Future of Europe' in Rome, Italy, in September 2019 for their helpful comments on the first draft of this article. Particularly helpful were the very encouraging and constructive comments from the editors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers of the journal on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a classification of the countries to the individual regions see Table A1 in the supplementary material.

2 Total GHG emissions include carbon dioxide, methane nitrous oxide, unspecified mix of hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and nitrogen trifluoride.

3 The notion of ‘center parties’ is a broad term. A more detailed examination of the party families revealed that the Christian center parties had no impact on GHGE. In contrast, secular center parties like the agrarian parties in the Nordic countries or the Democrats in the United States have a negative impact on reducing GHG emissions (Jahn, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Jean Monnet Network GOVTRAN – Governing the EU’s Climate and Energy Transition in Turbulent Times, with the support of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

Notes on contributors

Detlef Jahn

Detlef Jahn is a Professor of comparative politics at the University of Greifswald (Germany). His latest book is on ‘The Politics of Environmental Performance' with Cambridge University Press (2018). For more information see https://ipk.uni-greifswald.de/politikwissenschaft/professor-dr-detlef-jahn/