Weak congruence between public opinion and policy outcome in energy and climate policy – Is there something wrong with Finnish democracy?

Abstract

This paper describes a real-life case of national-level energy and climate policy preparation during the 2015–2019 parliamentary term in Finland and examines the extent to which policy decisions on energy and climate policy measures were in line with public opinion collected as a part of the formal policy preparation process. As part of national energy and climate policy preparation, civil servants collected public opinion on a large number of possible energy and climate policy measures through an online public survey (N = 364). We compared the results of the survey with the actual policy measures that the politicians later chose to implement through Finland’s National Energy and Climate Strategy and conducted a statistical analysis using the Chi-square test and logistic regression.The results suggest that in our authentic case study, the politicians did not make their decisions on the basis of citizens’ opinions. Public opinion had very weak congruence with the policy decisions on energy and climate policy measures. Some policy decisions were even completely contrary to the views of the citizens. We discuss the possible reasons for this result, for example, competing sources of advice for policy preparation and the special nature of energy and climate policy in terms of designing new policy measures and changing current policy.