Explaining the Schwarzenegger Phenomenon: Local Frontrunners in Climate Policy

Johannes Urpelainen
Additional contact information
Johannes Urpelainen: Johannes Urpelainen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His research interests international cooperation and political economy, with a special focus on global environmental governance.

Global Environmental Politics, 2009, vol. 9, issue 3, 82-105

Abstract: The surge of local climate policy is a puzzling political-economic phenomenon. Why have local policy-makers, incapable of mitigating global warming through individual emissions reductions, adopted ambitious policies while national governments refrain from action? I construct a game-theoretic model of two-level climate policy with incomplete information over political benefits. In equilibrium, the government selects a lax national regulation, and local policy-makers with private information on high local benefits choose more ambitious policies despite incentives to free ride. The analysis also suggests that even though local policy-makers prefer not to reveal information to the government, they must do so to pursue short-term political gains. Counterintuitively, new information can lead to more ambitious national regulation even if the government learns that the local political benefits are likely lower than expected. As an empirical application, I study the evolution of climate policies in the United States. (c) 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/glep.2009.9.3.82 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:glenvp:v:9:y:2009:i:3:p:82-105

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().