Green means stop: veto players and their impact on climate-change policy outputs

Political institutions can hinder the adoption of certain policies. Veto-players theory suggests that more political institutions in a state will lead to lower rates of policy adoption. Extending this argument to climate-change policy, I contend that more political institutions will lead to lower overall climate-policy adoption rates, lower adoption rates for cost-concentrated climate-policy tools, and lower adoption rates for significant climate policies. Using new data on climate policies and legislative passage rates in 23 OECD states between 1996 and 2010, I find empirical evidence demonstrating that the number of political institutions intrinsic to a state negatively affects climate-policy adoption.