Secondary Issues and Party Politics: An Application to Environmental Policy

Vincent Anesi () and Philippe De Donder

No 6774, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: The paper develops a political economy model to assess the interplay between political party formation and an environmental policy dimension viewed as secondary to the redistributive dimension. We define being a secondary issue in terms of the intensity of preferences over this issue rather than in terms of the proportion of voters who care for the environment. We build on Levy (2004) for the political equilibrium concept, defined as the solution to a two stage game where politicians first form parties and where parties then compete by choosing a policy bundle in order to win the elections. We obtain the following results: i) The Pigouvian tax never emerges in an equilibrium; ii) The equilibrium environmental tax is larger when there is a minority of green voters; iii) Stable green parties exist only if there is a minority of green voters and income polarization is large enough relative to the saliency of the environmental issue. We also study the redistributive policies advocated by green parties.

Keywords: electoral competition; income polarization; party formation; salience; stable green party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-env and nep-pol
Date: 2008-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP6774.asp (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Secondary issues and party politics: an application to environmental policy (2011)
Working Paper: Secondary Issues and Party Politics. An Application to Environmental Policy (2011)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:6774

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP6774.asp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Address: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 77 Bastwick Street, London EC1V 3PZ
Series data maintained by ().