Perceptions of Corruption, Political Distrust, and the Weakening of Climate Policy

Abstract

I present a theory of the relationship between public perceptions of political corruption and the strength of national climate change mitigation policies, which is then formally tested in a time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis of twenty industrialized democracies from 1990-2012. While perceived corruption is often a symptom of actual institutional corruption that undermines government performance across a variety of policy domains, the perception itself can be particularly pernicious to climate policymaking: by inflaming political distrust, distracting public discourse from foresighted policy debate, bolstering the strategic influence of energy-intensive businesses opposing emissions regulations, and biasing legislatures to adopt a laissez-faire or tawdry approach. The analysis reveals that greater perceptions of corruption are highly and robustly associated with weaker climate policies - especially non-market policies - when controlling for relevant political and economic variables. A government perceived by citizens to be mildly corrupt but that transitions to very clean would be associated with strengthening non-market climate policies from levels in Greece to levels in Sweden, or from levels in the United States to those in the Netherlands. Weak market-based climate policies are also significantly linked to greater perceived corruption, but notably, such policies are robustly associated with the size of domestic energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries, which have received substantial environmental tax exemptions and free allocations even in the greenest, high-trust, low-corruption democracies.