Title: Political Leadership Has Limited Impact on Fossil Fuel Taxes and Subsidies

Speaker: Paasha Mahdavi, UCSB

 

Abstract: For countries to rapidly decarbonize they need strong leadership, according to both academic studies and popular accounts. But leadership on climate issues is difficult to measure and its importance is unclear. We use original data to investigate the role of 623 presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs in 155 countries in their countries' climate policies, focusing on the reform of gasoline taxes and subsidies. Our findings suggest that the role of leadership is surprisingly limited and often ephemeral. Using permutation inference methods, we find that leader tenures fail to explain variation in gasoline taxes and subsidies in most countries. This holds true regardless of the leader's age, gender, education, or political ideology. Rulers who govern during an economic crisis perform no better or worse than other rulers. Even Presidents and Prime Ministers who were recognized by the United Nations for environmental leadership had no more success than other leaders in reducing subsidies or raising fuel taxes. Where leaders appear to play an important role---primarily in countries with large subsidies---their reforms often failed, with subsidies returning to pre-reform levels within the first 12 months 62% of the time, and within five years 87% of the time. Our findings suggest that leaders of all types find it exceptionally hard to have a lasting impact on gasoline taxes and subsidies.

 

Bio: Paasha Mahdavi is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science & Management (by courtesy) at UCSB and Director of the Energy Governance and Political Economy (EGAPE) Lab. His research focuses on the impact of oil and gas resources on governance and environmental politics. He is the author of Power Grab: Political Survival Through Extractive Resource Nationalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Politics, Nature Energy, PNAS, and World Politics. Mahdavi serves as Campbell Fellow at the Hoover Institution, non-resident fellow at the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy and at the Payne Institute, as a former fellow at the World Economic Forum, and as a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a PhD in political science and MS in statistics from UCLA, and BA in economics from Columbia.