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ABSTRACT
As climate change continues to affect countries worldwide, scholars have begun considering the impact of environmental stress for political instability in industrialized countries. This paper analyzes the risk of social unrest in various European political systems in relation to the interaction of environmental stress and electoral institutions. We use a spatially and temporally disaggregated dataset to examine the possible relationships between environmental stress and social unrest in all European Union member countries from 2000 to 2020. We find that there are stark differences between the observed interaction of majoritarian electoral features and environmentally induced unrest in those European states with a history of Communist rule or climate vulnerability versus the rest of Europe. Overall, these results suggest that electoral systems play an important but heterogenous role in the understanding of climate change and political unrest.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See, for instance, Journal of Peace Research’s 2012 (1) and 2022 (1) special issues.
2. Exceptions include Zhang et al. Citation2011; Tol and Wagner, Citation2012.
3. See, for instance, Wood and Wright (2016).
4. NUTS territorial units are formal administrative divisions of countries within the EU which roughly align with country provinces. More information is included in the online appendix.
5. See the online appendix for additional information on measurement and calculation.
6. There is little overlap between post-Communist countries and climate vulnerability in our dataset – notably, Pearson’s r = −.3157.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nadia Eldemerdash
Nadia Eldemerdash is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She received a PhD in political science from UNLV in 2023. Her research interests centre on migration, regime change, and conflict in the developing world.
Christian B. Jensen
Christian Jensen is an Associate Professor in Political Science at UNLV. His research focusses on the politics of Europe, with particular emphasis on institutions and parties.
Steven T. Landis
Steven Landis is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research focusses on the intersections between international security and environmental politics, intrastate conflict, comparative development, and quantitative methods.