Comparative climate politics : patterns of climate policy performance in western democracies

Although the comparative study of environmental politics and policy dates back well into the 1970s, it has never featured prominently within comparative politics generally. Against a background of mounting environmental pressures, most notably climate change, this low profile seems puzzling. As Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012) point out, building bridges between comparative environmental politics and the broader field of comparative politics is an important task for current research. This dissertation seeks to contribute to this linkage by revisiting the issue of cross-national environmental performance, focusing on climate performance. By addressing both the outcome and the output dimension of national climate performance, this thesis engages with two central issues of comparative politics: (i) the effect of political institutions on performance and (ii) policy change. Thus, it also contributes to broader research into the capacity of political systems to deal with complex longterm political problems. This dissertation attempts to make six major conceptual, methodological, and analytical contributions: 1) the thesis presents a conceptualization of general environmental performance based on the “planetary boundaries” approach; 2) it provides a theoretical framework for policy output and develops a measurement for its assessment; 3) it argues that actor constellations of specific environmental problems need to be considered to strengthen theoretical arguments about the effects of political institutions; 4) it argues that entire policy portfolios rather than (a set of) individual policy instruments need to be considered for assessing policy change; 5) it analyses the effect of political institutions on climate performance; 6) and it analyses policy change in climate mitigation and the role of policy innovations in altering policy portfolios.