Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 45, Issue 2, June 2003, Pages 203-220
Ecological Economics

ANALYSIS
Are left-wing party strength and corporatism good for the environment? Evidence from panel analysis of air pollution in OECD countries

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0921-8009(03)00012-0Get rights and content

Abstract

The effect of left-wing party strength and corporatism on air pollution levels in up to 21 OECD countries over the period 1980 or 1990–1999 is tested with both fixed-effects and random-effects estimators. Controlling for scale, composition, technique as well as aggregate time effects, robust evidence is found that parliamentary green/left-libertarian party strength is associated with lower pollution levels. The rise of ecologically oriented parties has thus had a real impact on air pollution levels. Traditional left-wing party strength is possibly also associated with lower pollution levels, but the evidence is less consistent and robust. Combined left-wing party strength in government is possibly associated with higher pollution levels, but this result is also far from robust and is practically small. No evidence is found for a consistent systematic impact of corporatism on pollution levels.

Introduction

Do countries with a stronger representation of traditional and green/libertarian left-wing parties in parliament and government have lower environmental pollution levels? Do countries with a more corporatist structure of society and economy have less pollution? It is often suggested that the answer to both questions is yes, but existing empirical analyses suffer from important drawbacks. To test the two hypotheses more comprehensively, I apply panel estimation techniques to a set of air pollution data in 18–21 countries of the Organisation of Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) over the period 1980 or 1990–1999, depending on data availability. In using a panel data set and applying more advanced econometric estimation techniques, this article improves on earlier contributions such as King and Borchardt, 1994, Crepaz, 1995, Jahn, 1998, Scruggs, 1999, Scruggs, 2001. I find consistent and robust evidence that a strong presence of green/libertarian left-wing parties in parliament is associated with lower pollution levels. Evidence with respect to traditional left-wing parties’ parliamentary strength and the combined left-wing party presence in government is less consistent and robust. If anything, it points towards an ambiguous effect, where traditional left-wing party strength in terms of the share of legislative seats in the national parliament might be associated with lower pollution levels, but a higher share of cabinet portfolios belonging to left-wing parties might be associated with higher pollution levels. Even where statistically significant, the latter effect is practically negligible, however. No evidence is found that would corroborate the hypothesis that a strong corporatist structure of society and the economy systematically leads to lower pollution levels.

The next section considers some theoretical arguments on why left-wing party strength and corporatism might be associated with lower pollution levels. Section 3 reviews the few studies that have addressed the issue empirically. Section 4 presents the research design for this paper's analysis. Results are presented in Section 5, they are subjected to sensitivity analysis in Section 6 and discussed in the last section.

Section snippets

The effects of left-wing party strength and corporatism on environmental outcomes

A priori it is not clear that left-wing party strength and corporatism will lead to better environmental outcomes. As concerns party strength, the traditional political objectives of left-wing parties might make them adversary to environmental protection measures. These measures are costly and might threaten jobs, if not economy-wide then possibly in heavily-polluting industrial sectors such as basic metals, chemicals and non-metallic mineral products that are traditionally characterised by

Review of existing quantitative studies

There are only few studies that have analysed the effect of left-wing party strength and corporatism on environmental outcomes. King and Borchardt (1994) look at per capita pollution levels of five air pollutants as well as their unweighted sum for 17 OECD countries in 1 year only, 1980. They use six proxy indicators of left-wing party strength averaged over the period 1970–1980. Those six indicators comprise the percentage of years that left-wing parties participated in government, the

The dependent variables

Ideally one would like to test the impact of left-wing party strength and corporatism on a variety of aspects of environmental pollution. Unfortunately, poor data availability means that comprehensive quantitative tests are currently confined to emissions of important air pollutants, which have traditionally been characterised by relatively good monitoring and recording. Emission data for 18 OECD-countries stem from EMEP (2002). The Co-operative Programme for Monitoring and Evaluation of the

Results

Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5, Table 6 report results for our sample of air pollutants. Estimations for all pollutants follow the same ordered structure. Regression I provides fixed-effects estimation, regression II random-effects estimation. Note that the corporatism variable is excluded from the fixed-effects regressions as it varies only very little over time, which implies that fixed-effects estimation is not suitable. In all estimations two absolute t-values are reported in brackets.

Sensitivity analysis

In this section we will examine whether our results are sensitive to changing certain assumptions about our estimations. If the three variables are entered in isolation rather than simultaneously, then basically the same conclusions prevail (detailed results not reported). I also checked for a non-linear effect of left-wing party strength via the inclusion of squared terms. No robust evidence for non-linear effects were found.

What happens to our variables of left-wing party strength and

Discussion and concluding observations

On the whole, the hypothesised scale effect on pollution levels is well confirmed in our estimations. A higher per capita economic output and, if less clearly, greater per capita use of vehicles lead to increased per capita pollution levels, all other things equal. The hypothesised composition and technique effect also find some confirmation in the results. In most regressions, a higher share of fossil fuels is associated with higher per capita pollution levels, whereas greater energy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments.

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