The Political Consequences of Green Policies: Evidence from Italy

Italo Colantone, Livio Di Lonardo, Yotam Margalit and Marco Percoco

No 9599, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: For many governments enacting green policies is a priority, but these often entail substantial and uneven costs on citizens. How does the introduction of green policies affect voting? We study this question in the context of a major ban on polluting cars introduced in Milan. The policy was strongly opposed by the right-wing populist party Lega, portraying it as a “radical-chic-leftist” initiative penalizing common people. We show that owners of banned vehicles—who incurred a median loss of €3,750—were significantly more likely to vote for Lega in the subsequent elections. This electoral shift does not stem from increased environmental skepticism, but rather from the perceived unfairness of the policy and its pocketbook implications. In fact, recipients of compensation from the local government were not more likely to switch to Lega. The findings underscore that addressing the distributive consequences is key for advancing green policies that are politically sustainable.

Keywords: environmental politics; green policies; distributional consequences; compensation mechanisms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 P10 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9599.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9599

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().