Public opinion, elections, and environmental policy stringency in the European Union

We investigate how public opinion, along with the electoral process and government's ideology affect the stringency of environmental policy in a subset of European Union countries. We pursue a dynamic panel data analysis and account for a set of economic, institutional, and political factors that can potentially affect policies aiming at placing a cost to behaviors that negatively impact the environment. We provide evidence that public concern for the environment, as gauged by opinion surveys, positively affects environmental policy stringency, and reveal that elections have a similar effect. We do not find evidence of partisan effects. Our results are impervious to a wide set of robustness tests.