Very interesting result! What struck me most: nobody picked “depends”. I think that’s the right answer, but the question is, of course, "on what". To answer this, let’s start with some general thoughts about the role of voters and interst groups in policymaking.

https://twitter.com/edenhofer_jacob/status/2012249546110202203

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Simplifying crudely, think of both as "principals" that can impose political losses on a policymaker when (s)he deviates from their "bliss point", their ideal. In climate policy, two forces change which constraint binds as decarbonisation deepens: 1. Rising marginal adjustment **

costs as stringency increases (low-hanging fruit are reaped). 2. Cost incidence visibility / attribution: whether households/voters experience costs as direct, frequent, and clearly attributable to some climate policy (e.g. a carbon tax). Now add an empirical **

regularity: many rich democracies have, roughly speaking, pursued the following sequence. Early abatement/policy effort: power sector. Later: transport + buildings/housing. Later still (often): agriculture, heavy industry, land-use. Why does this matter? Because policies **

targeted at the power sector have some rather specific characteristics. The are:

• they are technically complex and implementation-heavy (markets, permitting, grid, investment),
• producer-centred (concentrated stakes; organised actors -> can be bought off via exemptions or free **

allocations at relatively moderate costs),

• the costs for households, albeit not insignificant, can often be diffused quiet effectively (both geographically and temporally); they also reach voters via pass-through, which makes attribution more difficult. The result: early **

climate policy was largely (!) "quiet politics" a la Culpepper. I say "largely" because public opinion wasn’t irrelevant. Even in early phases, green parties and NGOs mattered as salience entrepreneurs. Specifically, their presence entailed a threat cambridge.org/core/books/qui… **

for governments: if you pander too much to dirty interest groups, then we will raise the salience of that deviation from public opinion and you will suffer political losses. Importantly, the incentive to politicise is – perhaps somewhat paradoxically – greater for those **

parties that have a low chance of being in government in the future (as was the case for many green parties). The reason is that, when you are in government, you need the powerful interest groups to cooperate (so that they share information and don’t obstruct your every turn). **

But they won’t be particularly cooperative if you have irked them in the previous period by politicising their anti-majoritarian skullduggery (see above). That threat is of course only credible when politicisation falls on fertile soil: some receptive pro-climate sentiment. **

Final caveat: such threats matter mostly for overall ambition (targets, packages, commitments), rather than the specifics of policy design (e.g. car standards or the rules for the allocation of free permits). Such salience entrepreneurs also matter in another way. By **

providing incentives for some climate policy and cover for pro-climate bureaucrats, they also enable governments to implement policies that reconfigure the interest group environment (e.g. feed-in tariffs that strengthen the renewables lobby). Early policies can thus **

build clean-sector constituencies that later lobby for ambition: the IG environment is, to some extent, endogenous to policy. As we move beyond the power sector, it becomes much more difficult to hide costs from consumers/voters. Transport + housing involve choices people make **

constantly (driving, heating, renovating). Costs become more visible and attributable. So, at higher stringency, voters “matter more” because distributional conflict and attribution become harder to avoid. This changes the political problem from tinkering with the design of **

policy instruments to creating a durable coalition. This is where compensation and pork-barrel politics become pivotal. If household incidence is visible, governments need to answer: who pays, when, and for what? See my brief with @fgenovese__. politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/media/zdubebua… **

So public opinion explains outcomes "better"when the policy is consumer-facing, costs are salient, and attribution is easy (e.g. heating regulation – hello, GEG, carbon pricing without revenue recycling, etc.). Interest group accounts, by contrast, are more helpful when **

policymaking is technical, the costs for votetrs can be obscured, and implementation depends on cooperation from organised producers. Where does geopolitics fit? It can reweight the mass and IG constraints: ▶️ energy price shocks can tighten the mass constraint **

▶️ foreign competition can weaken producers (e.g. Chinese EV industry weakening the power of the German car industry) Conclusion: The answer to the question depends on the stage of decarbonisation. Early(-ish) phases often look like interest-group politics (quiet, **

producer-centred, design-heavy). Later phases increasingly look like mass politics (consumer-centred, visible incidence, compensation-heavy). At high stringency, external competition/geopolitics can gain greater importance, especially as the fiscal space (and other conditions, **

e.g. polarisation, as in the US) required to relax the constraints domestically (e.g. via subsidising the green sector) narrows. The figure below tries to summarise this argument in a stylised way. As always, all of this is tentative. Let me know what you think. **

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More from @edenhofer_jacob

Jan 9

A deep paper – that popped into my head as I was perusing @sndurlauf’s recent essay on meritocracy. The paper raises a broader question: how to be meritocratic when there is uncertainty about the relative weights of luck and effort in individuals’ production function? One

approach is axiomatic, which sometimes allows us to disentangle luck and effort. Roemer as well as @PaulHufe, @APeichl, and Kanbur are wonderful examples in that regard. Often, however, we don’t have enough (or the right) data for this to work, tse-fr.eu/sites/default/…

especially in our day-to-day interactions. So, what if this uncertainty cannot be resolved? Three tentative pol econ thoughts on this. 1. I’d argue that uncertainty about luck/effort resembles Cappelen et al’s "second-order" fairness preferences academic.oup.com/restud/article…

Read 15 tweets

Jan 2

By way of preparing for teaching and making sense of current events, I spent today trying to synthesise the demand-side literature on democratic backsliding (see figure below). The starting point of most of this literature is simple: Do voters punish politicians who violate

democratic norms, or do they tolerate them when other considerations (policy, identity, partisanship) are at stake? Since the seminal contribution by Graham & Svolik (2020), this is often framed as a trade-off between democracy and policy. The figure seeks cambridge.org/core/journals/…

to add nuance by unpacking the ‘chain’ of democratic sanctioning and, in doing so, to also identify different failure modes. 1. Citizens don’t observe “violations” directly. They observe actions whose implications are uncertain and contested. Everything that follows depends on

Read 23 tweets

Dec 29, 2025

Here are my favourite papers on climate policy and politics this year (in no particular order). Let me know what other papers and books you’ve found insightful.

1. Ascari, Guido, Andrea Colciago, Timo Haber, and Stefan Wöhrmüller. 2025. ‘Inequality along the European Green Transition*’. @EJ_RES. doi.org/10.1093/ej/uea…

2. Calvacanti, Tiago, Zeina Hasna, and Cezar Santos. 2025. ‘Climate Change Mitigation Policies: Aggregate and Distributional Effects’. @EJ_RES. 135(668): 1341–87. doi.org/10.1093/ej/uea…

Read 21 tweets

Dec 16, 2025

Excited to have just finished this pre-analysis plan (PAP) with Lara, @johannesbrehm, and Henri – it will be interesting to see which, if any, of our predictions will be borne out by the data. More on that in the new year. In the meanwhile, let me tell you about our theory.

Two observations constitute our starting point: 1⃣A well-established stylised empirical fact on climate public opinion is women express greater support for climate policy than men. ➡️What is less clear is which groups drive this gap, especially on osf.io/9usd2/files/ms…

the male side (see also the cool work by Amelia Malpas in the non-climate context), and among the unaffected, those not directly exposed to climate-induced job losses. 2⃣Much of the literature focuses on those (in)directly affected by the adverse ameliamalpas.com

Read 16 tweets

Dec 11, 2025

Recently, I have been thinking about the political economy of policy advice. Below are my thoughts; I’d be curious to hear what "practitioners" think about these. Let’s start by thinking about the demand for and supply in the market for policy advice.

Policymakers rely on expert advice because it serves two purposes. 1⃣ Expertise can lead to better policies or implementation by providing an evidence-based overview of the costs and benefits of different policy instruments or objectives. 2⃣Expertise can provide legitimation.

Expert statements (e.g. in interviews) can help policymakers justify their preferred positions to coalition partners, interest groups, or attentive elites. The relative weight of these functions depends on the institutional and political environment in which policymakers operate.

Read 27 tweets

Nov 26, 2025

There is understandably a great deal of interest in fighting populism. I share the normative aspiration. Yet the more I think about it, the more I find myself drawn to a more pessimistic interpretation. The latter may well be wrong. But articulating it helps clarify whether

https://twitter.com/edenhofer_jacob/status/1993084072290091381

there are strong grounds for greater optimism. Based on the above presentation, here is a thumbnail sketch for why fighting right-wing populism is so hard. I. Powerful structural forces have reshaped political competition and made the job of mainstream politicians much harder

Contemporary political competition is shaped by structural changes that are neither easily reversed nor influenced by tweak to mainstream parties’ strategies or platforms. + The cultural dimension has become significantly more salient, even though preferences on this

Read 18 tweets