Nathan Mariano

Fully decarbonized markets for consumer goods would result in drastic lifestyle changes for many individuals. However, most research on climate policy attitudes focuses on energy policy, rather than policies that affect consumer goods that people use and enjoy. I conduct a survey experiment that compares views on an energy tax policy to views on a policy that taxes a high-emissions consumer good (red meat & dairy products). The results show that the effect of targeting consumer goods on support for decarbonization depends on an individual’s consumption preferences. Frequent consumers become less supportive of climate policy when it affects a particular consumer good, whereas non-consumers become more supportive. We observe the first outcome even though the cost of the two policies to consumers is equivalent, highlighting the role of subjective and identity attachments to consumer goods in policy attitudes. This shows how climate policy can favor the interests of certain consumers over others, making groups of consumers another relevant distributive cleavage in climate politics.

We analyse how Euroscepticism affects the bargaining success of governments in European Union (EU) legislative negotiations. We argue that pro-European governments who face Euroscepticism at home are more successful in the EU. Pro-European governments can use the threat of Euroscepticism to bargain for better outcomes in the Council’s informal negotiating environment, with the goal of mitigating electoral losses to Eurosceptic challengers. We test the empirical implications of our theory using the extended DEU data set on legislative negotiations from 1998-2019. The estimations of a multi-level mixed effects regression model provide support for our theory, showing that pro-European governments facing Eurosceptic publics achieve EU policies closer to their preferred outcomes.