Saturday, March 15, 2014
Embassy (Omni Shoreham)
The environment emerged as a political issue in the 1970s giving birth to Green Parties across Western democracies and providing a new party conflict line with proponents on the Left. This is therefore an ideal issue to study how party politics emerges and institutionalizes on a new issue. How did the environment enter national parliaments and how was it institutionalized? In connection to this overall question, what happens to environmental policy when a Green party appears? To what extend do Left parties use the ownership they have acquired on the issue to pressurize Right governments? Has the institutionalization of the issue changed the playing field? Importantly, what policy consequences did it have? To address such questions, new extensive data on the establishment and expansion of national environmental bureaucracies are collected for the study. In combination with detailed comparative data on environmental legislation and party politics from more than thirty Western countries from its conception in the early 1970s, this paper provides unprecedented systematic evidence on how party politics has influenced the policy development on the environment paying particular attention to the temporal dynamics.
