Greening up or not? The determinants of political parties’ environmental concern: an empirical analysis based on European data (1970-2008)

Michallet, Benjamin and Gaeta, Giuseppe Lucio and Facchini, Francois (2015): Greening up or not? The determinants of political parties’ environmental concern: an empirical analysis based on European data (1970-2008).

Abstract

Why do parties offer environmental policies in their political programs? While a number of papers examine the determinants of citizens’ pro-environmental behaviour, we know little about the extent to which political parties adjust their platform towards environmentalism. We investigate this process through data provided by the Manifesto Project Dataset (CMP) for 20 European countries over the period 1970-2008. Following the literature on public concern towards environment, we examine economic, environmental and political determinants. Our findings provide evidence that political parties’ environmental concern is strongly correlated with their political ideology and with country-level economic conditions.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: environmental concern, environmental attitudes, political parties, electoral manifestos
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D78 - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation; Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q5 - Environmental Economics > Q58 - Government Policy; Z - Other Special Topics > Z1 - Cultural Economics ; Economic Sociology ; Economic Anthropology > Z13 - Economic Sociology ; Economic Anthropology ; Social and Economic Stratification

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