Behavioral Political Economy and Environmental Policy: Explaining Persistent Deviations from Efficient Policies

Jan Schnellenbach ()
Additional contact information
Jan Schnellenbach: Brandenburg University of Technology, Chair for Microeconomics

A chapter in A Green Entrepreneurial State?, 2026, pp 93-110 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This study examines why environmental policymaking often diverges from fact-based reasoning, drawing on insights from behavioral political economy. Concepts such as rational irrationality, expressive political behavior, and availability cascades explain why voters and policymakers systematically adopt biased beliefs and fail to update these beliefs in an unbiased way. Two cases are analyzed: Germany’s nuclear exit and contemporary calls for degrowth. Both illustrate how heuristics, biases, and expressive motives shape public opinion and policy outcomes, often at the expense of efficiency.

Keywords: Behavioral political economy; Heuristics and biases; Environmental policy; Expressive political behavior; Green transition; D72; D78; D91; H11; Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:inschp:978-3-032-15512-2_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783032155122

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-15512-2_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Studies in Entrepreneurship from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().