BALLOT STRUCTURE, DISTRICT MAGNITUDE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY STRINGENCY. A Quantitative Study of OECD Countries

Sammanfattning: The role of the electoral rules, and the ballot structure more specifically, in determining environmental policy outcomes has received minimal attention in the literature. This paper contributes to this gap by analyzing the environmental policy consequences in proportional representation (PR) systems with different ballot designs. As previous research suggests, in open-list proportional representation (OLPR), candidates have more incentives to cultivate the ‘personal vote’. Providing particularistic benefits is an effective strategy for doing that. I argue that when campaigning on environmental issues, politicians lower environmental policy stringency in exchange for support from industry interest groups – whose support is vital for politicians’ overall electoral strategies. Thus, environmental policy stringency is expected to be lower in OLPR than in CLPR (closed-list proportional representation) systems. I also explore whether district magnitude moderates the effect of the ballot structure. I conduct an empirical test of 25 countries in the period 1975 to 2017 using a hybrid within- and between-effects model. I find that, in accordance with my hypothesis, (1) OLPR is negatively associated with environmental policy stringency; and (2) that as district magnitude increases, the negative effect of the open-list ballot structure on the stringency of environmental policy decreases.