Research

Deforestation often spikes around elections in newer democracies, as officials relax forest protections in exchange for political support, undermining a public good. The reasons behind this are unclear, and findings for other public goods like air quality are mixed. This paper proposes a new framework to explain these dynamics. Electoral competition is argued to improve environmental quality when local politicians have formal responsibility, and the benefits of the environmental good are diffuse. However, when local control is limited and benefits are concentrated, local politicians can coerce the relevant authorities (e.g., federal agents), degrading environmental quality. Evidence from Brazil, comparing forest protections and sewage infrastructure, supports this framework. First, 60+ interviews with enforcement agents and politicians from nine months of fieldwork provide qualitative insights. Second, I use a Difference-in-Differences analysis of 300,000 deforestation-related fines and find electoral competition leads to lower fines. An Instrumental Variables analysis, using the location of evangelical churches as a proxy for electoral competition, provides further evidence of a causal link. Finally, similar models show an opposite effect of electoral competition on sewage infrastructure, consistent with the theory. These results advance the debate on democracy’s role in environmental quality and public goods provision. Draft: https://osf.io/x3s8t

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.

Does extreme weather erode political trust in the Global South? Conventional wisdom suggests citizens are retrospective and attentive to government responsiveness after disasters. Instead, this paper argues high income inequality significantly influences how different groups update trust in relation to adverse weather events. On one hand, extreme weather erodes trust among affluent citizens, as they are used to responsive government. On the other hand, less affluent individuals are unlikely to change their trust in politics after extreme weather, since their low expectations of government responsiveness lead to more rigid levels of trust. The theory is supported by a quasi-experiment using opinion surveys (AmericasBarometer) from over 12,000 individuals in Mexico and Brazil (2006-2019) alongside objective extreme weather data. I find these objective weather measures strongly correlate with subjective experiences of drought and water rationing across socioeconomic groups, but only high-income individuals attribute these disruptions to government. The results highlight the importance of preexisting inequities in shaping belief adjustments after extreme weather in the Global South and underscore the risks to vulnerable populations amid the climate crisis. Draft: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4508887

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.

The liberal international order (LIO) faces growing challenges from newly elected leaders and parties worldwide, many of whom also target domestic bureaucrats. While existingresearch emphasizes bureaucratic exit strategies, this paper explores an alternative: principal shopping. This concept describes how bureaucrats engage directly with legislaturesto build alliances, influence policy, and uphold liberal internationalism. Focusing on thecase of Brazil, I use a mixed-methods approach to test this theory. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Model (LLM) analysis of over 1,200 senate commissiontranscripts (2013–2022) reveals that bureaucratic participation is associated with increasedreferences to International Organizations (IOs), a proxy for interest in liberal internation-alism. Furthermore, sentiment analysis shows that when bureaucrats are present in publichearings, they make the discussion of IOs more positive when right-wing senators presideover hearings. Interviews with bureaucrats and politicians, along with ethnographic observations from dozens of public hearings in 2022 during an administration hostile to the LIO,further support these findings. This paper reveals how public administration can help defendthe LIO but also highlights an unconventional pathway to that activism through legislativeparticipation. Draft: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/9u6gm