Public opinion, elections, and environmental policy stringency in the European Union

Georgios Chortareas (), Vasileios Logothetis () and Andreas A. Papandreou ()
Additional contact information
Georgios Chortareas: King’s Business School, King’s College London
Vasileios Logothetis: University of Ioannina
Andreas A. Papandreou: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Journal of Economics and Finance, 2025, vol. 49, issue 2, No 7, 474-492

Abstract: Abstract We investigate how public opinion, along with the electoral process and government’s ideology affect the stringency of environmental policy in a subset of European Union countries. We pursue a dynamic panel data analysis and account for a set of economic, institutional, and political factors that can potentially affect policies aiming at placing a cost to behaviors that negatively impact the environment. We provide evidence that public concern for the environment, as gauged by opinion surveys, positively affects environmental policy stringency, and reveal that elections have a similar effect. We do not find evidence of partisan effects. Our results are impervious to a wide set of robustness tests.

Keywords: Public opinion; Environmental protection; European Union (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D72 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12197-025-09714-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:jecfin:v:49:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s12197-025-09714-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/12197/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s12197-025-09714-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by James Payne

More articles in Journal of Economics and Finance from Springer, Academy of Economics and Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().