Collective Action and Distributive Conflict: Essays on Environmental Politics

Is it collective action or distributive conflict that better characterizes the contemporary environmental politics? The present thesis sheds new lights on these two accounts without positing the overriding importance of either. The canonical collective action theory implies inaction and finds it hard to explain why in fact environmental action exists in some countries without an effective multilateral enforcement mechanism, whereas I theorize and empirically show that collection action leads to delayed and insufficient action when it comes to ratcheting domestic environmental policies up. Chapter 1 focuses on the understudied technology-push side: the government funding of environmental innovation, of which trade-borne positive externality gives rise to free-riding. Next, Chapter 2 examines a long-delayed policy action: reforming fossil fuel subsidies, which I operationalize with the change of gasoline taxes since undertaxing equals implicitly subsidizing. I argue that facing such a politically delicate issue, risk-averse policy makers reciprocate, i.e., carefully following each other to act sluggishly, to do nothing, or even to move backward. With time-series cross-section data, spatial econometric modeling lends support to my arguments. With that, the last two chapters pay attention to distributive conflict—especially when it crosscuts other cleavages in mass preferences on environmental action. Chapter 3 presents with varied data sources that the pocketbook-based distributive conflict moderates the ideational clash: leftists are less willing to support environmental action when they have less money to afford it. Finally, Chapter 4 conceptualizes the variable exposure to climate change as an emergent, place-based distributive conflict between climate-vulnerable people and those less affected. I argue with evidence from the European Social Survey that when it crosscuts the sector- and pocketbook-based distributive conflict, the cross-pressured individuals are less likely to become climate policy opponents. There are discussions about important policy implications of each chapter, and I conclude this thesis with avenues for future research.