Research

Do competitive elections enhance environmental protection? As climate change intensifies, debates grow over whether electoral pressures drive stronger environmental policies in consolidating democracies. This paper argues that political competition can simultaneously improve and undermine environmental protection within the same election. Candidates weigh polluters’ demands against potential voter backlash: when environmental degradation is highly visible, politicians are less likely to side with polluters. But when degradation is less visible to voters, they are more likely to promote impunity. The paper provides evidence from a mixed-methods study of the Brazilian Amazon, using a Difference-in-Differences approach that leverages an exogenous geographic feature that causes smoke from forest fires to concentrate unevenly despite widespread fires. Findings are supported by fieldwork across Brazil and the Amazon region. These findings contribute to a growing political economy literature and show how local electoral dynamics can threaten environmental governance.. Draft: https://osf.io/xtrn4

Previous research suggests that international competition between regulatory regimes and interest group influence can erode environmental standards by diluting domestic policy enactment. In this paper, we propose that environmental standards can decline even in a context in which regulations are not directly lobbied against and in fact remain nationally sovereign by means of populist political signals. We focus specifically on the implications that political events in favour of international disintegration have on polluting firms’ behavior. We argue that the political secession from international regulatory regimes feeds into polluting firms’ expectations about future regulatory uncertainty, and that in territories where state capacity is relatively weak, this implies that firms will start shirking from environmental compliance in the direct aftermath of such political events. We support our theory with evidence from offshore oil rig spills in the North Sea between 2015 and 2022, following the Brexit referendum. A grid-cell analysis of satellite-detected oil spills compares firm behavior in the United Kingdom, European Union, and Norwegian jurisdictions. We find that UK waters experienced nearly three times more oil spills compared to non-UK waters two years after the Brexit vote. Additionally, discrepancies between firm-reported and satellite-observed incidents, parliamentary lobbying data, and shareholder earnings transcripts provide further credence to our argument about the implications of sovereignist political events on firms’ derisking around public goods. Our findings provide new insights into how disruptions in international policy integration affect firms’ behavior and public policy standards. Draft: https://osf.io/vrq78

Does the public reward incumbents for relief aid after extreme weather events? Despite theurgency of the climate crisis, relatively little is known about the political consequences ofdisaster relief globally. This paper argues that voters are unlikely to reward relief in contextswhere responsibility for disasters is unclear. The argument is tested with granular data fromBrazil on public opinion and electoral behavior. Cross-national surveys show Brazilians aremore uncertain about responsibility compared to those in 17 other countries in the Ameri-cas. A panel analysis of public opinion reveals that receiving aid does little to increase trust inpoliticians or influence vote intention. Mayoral elections are then analyzed using matchingand difference-in-differences methods, revealing no significant electoral rewards for reliefaid. In the context of climate politics, the results suggest that politicians have little electoralincentive to respond effectively to disasters in settings of low clarity of responsibility. Draft: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/65tyk

Middle-income countries face substantial pressure from wealthy governments to reform their environmental policies and practices. Few countries have faced greater foreign criticism than Brazil, with its large population and stewardship over most of the world’s largest rainforest. What are the effects of this foreign pressure on Brazilian citizens’ opinions regarding environmental protection? In a pre-registered survey experiment (n = 1003), I probe the effects of prompts regarding foreign aid and shame from abroad on Brazilians’ attitudes toward an array of climate policies. I find that foreign pressures have limited overall effects, except that shame significantly decreases support for a carbon tax. Pre-registered heterogeneity analysis suggests that aid generally increases support for climate policy among environmentally conscious citizens. But for subjects who do not prioritize the environment, against expectations I find that aid significantly decreases support for climate policies and shame, paradoxically, sometimes increases such support. The results largely indicate that foreign pressures land very differently for distinct types of citizens based on their prior levels of environmentalism. Draft: https://osf.io/p4dtx

The Global South faces acute and existential impacts from climate change. Yet we know little about the different dimensions of climate vulnerability that characterizes these countries, and how these vulnerabilities may affect the politicization of climate change. We introduce the novel Climate Vulnerability Database that maps both ecological climate risk and climate policy vulnerability – i.e., the presence of fossil fuel extraction – at the municipality level across time in six Global South countries: Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa and Vietnam. Focusing on turnout and protests, we argue that the different dimensions of climate vulnerability have heterogeneous effects on political mobilization. We show that while ecological shocks can drive protest and depress turnout, this is mediated by existing levels of deprivation and, importantly, the presence of fossil fuels. Additionally, we find evidence for different patterns of information seeking regarding climate change following ecological shocks, with dampening in policy vulnerability communities. These findings suggest climate change is inherently distributional, and its effects on political mobilization also depend on the distribution of fossil fuels and deprivation in Global South contexts.

What political conditions catalyze energy transitions? Existing work suggests energy supply shocks promote renewable energy development by disrupting entrenched interests and drawing the long-term viability of existing energy sources into question. This article examines such claims in the context of an often-overlooked energy source: Hydropower. Increasingly frequent droughts lead to electricity crises in hydropower-dependent countries, plausibly motivating governments to seek alternatives. We propose and deploy a novel measure of such deficits, which we term hydrostress, leveraging fine-grained global hydrological data. Our findings indicate severe hydrostress motivates governments to shift policymaking towards renewable energy. However, hydrostress does not affect buildout. We develop and test three mechanisms for this apparent divergence: state capacity, accountability failures, and interest group resistance. We find no evidence to support the state capacity and interest group explanations, and limited suggestive evidence for accountability failures. These findings have important implications for the energy transition in hydropower dependent countries.

Whether and how International Organizations (IOs) influence member states is an ongoing debate. One argument is that domestic bureaucrats serve as a link, mediating IO advice at home. Bureaucrats are often motivated to serve as advocates not only when IO advice align with their preferences, but also because endorsing such advice can enhance their own credibility. Yet this theory has seldom been tested empirically. This paper addresses that gap. Drawing on new data from the case of Brazil, this paper finds domestic bureaucrats are key actors for making IO advice relevant to domestic politics and even legislation. This study uses an original dataset of 1,200 Brazilian Senate commission transcripts from 2013–2022, and shows that bureaucrat participation leads to significantly more mentions of IOs during hearings of legislation and other congressional matters. Also, 61 public hearings and testimonies with over 90,000 speaker-level utterances from the Senate inquiry into the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic are analyzed. Bureaucrats are more likely to mention IOs – namely, the World Health Organization (WHO) – in their testimony than any other type of speaker. Career civil servants were also more positive when mentioning IOs compared to others. These findings are complemented by interviews with bureaucrats and politicians, as well as ethnographic observation of Senate hearings. This paper contributes to debates on IO influence by highlighting the critical dynamics between international organizations, governments, and domestic bureaucrats in shaping how global advice is received and used. Draft: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/9u6gm