Environmental stress, majoritarianism, and social unrest in Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT As climate change continues to affect countries worldwide, scholars have begun considering the impact of environmental stress for political instability in industrialized countries. This paper analyzes the risk of social unrest in various European political systems in relation to the interaction of environmental stress and electoral institutions. We use a spatially and temporally disaggregated dataset to examine the possible relationships between environmental stress and social unrest in all European Union member countries from 2000 to 2020. We find that there are stark differences between the observed interaction of majoritarian electoral features and environmentally induced unrest in those European states with a history of Communist rule or climate vulnerability versus the rest of Europe. Overall, these results suggest that electoral systems play an important but heterogenous role in the understanding of climate change and political unrest.