Green parties and their effect on policy

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of green parties on environmental policy in Norway. Environmental policy is measured through the share of bike roads, number of charging stations for electric vehicles per capita, and environmental score given by an impartial organization for each municipality. The paper uses a regression discontinuity design on municipal data in Norway to answer the research question. It takes advantage of high-quality political data from the Local Government Dataset (Fiva et al., 2020) and publicly available data from SSB on environmental variables. The paper also investigates if there exists an incumbency effect on local and national elections from winning a local municipal election for the Green party. It uses the methods presented in Folke (2014) for estimating the threshold for winning a seat. A descriptive analysis is implemented for the outcome variables to extend on their relevance as measurement of environmental quality. The treatment group is municipalities where the Green party wins exactly one seat in the local council. The control group is the municipalities where the Green party wins no seats when they run for election. The paper concludes that green parties has no or little significant effect on local environmental policy. I also find no evidence to support the existence of an incumbency effect in future local or national elections for the Green party.