Egalitarian governance and the green energy transition: an empirical test of 46 industrial economies, 1990–2020

Abstract How well are the world´s major economies responding to the challenge of climate change? We address this question by assessing democratic governance styles, contrasted as more egalitarian from ones that are more liberal, on the green energy transition. We propose that egalitarian societies have a greater demand for balancing production, consumption, and rent-seeking demands with environmental ones, leading to more compromised solutions. We assess the effects of democratic style and measures of societal inequity on renewable energy production share, public environmentally related R&D expenditures, and CO 2 emission intensity in 46 major industrialized economies in the period 1990 to 2020. Random and fixed effects regressions consistently show that while egalitarian and liberal democracies associate with greener policy measures, such as higher spending on environmental R&D budgets, egalitarian governance consistently associates with higher CO 2 emissions. Contrary to the expectations of broad arguments highlighting the virtues of egalitarianism for mitigating climate change, the actual effects of greater egalitarian governance undermine the cause of climate gains. These results do not support the view that high consensus societies due to greater equity are transitioning to a greener economy faster than others even if they placate climate interests with higher investment in renewable energy. Future analyses need to focus more keenly on what measures enter green policies as mere “window dressing” while others make the hard choices for reducing overall emissions, which is ultimately how environmental gains should be measured.