How do private sector actors respond to the political incentives of climate policy? I address three distinct questions in this area of inquiry. First, I look at how the preferences of the public as consumers factor into climate policy views. I argue that when climate policy is framed as targeting a particular "lifestyle good", consumers of that good will respond more negatively to the policy. Using the cases of red meat and large gas-powered vehicles, I show that targeting climate policy to particular consumer goods affects patterns of support in substantively meaningful ways. This is not only because consumers face higher pocketbook costs from the policy than non-consumers do, but because of subjective, preferential attachments to particular goods.

Second, I investigate how changes in the regulatory environment can alter firms' propensity to voluntary pledge to reduce their emissions. I assemble a comprehensive dataset of emissions reduction targets with firm-level covariates, which I use to test how responses to an increased likelihood of public regulation vary by a firm's expected adjustment costs. I show that firms are more likely to set targets when the likelihood of regulation increases; but, crucially, they are less likely to do so as their prospective costs from regulation increase. I conclude that this is evidence of a cooperative relationship between public and private regulation.

Third, I study whether & when local clean energy interests can supersede partisanship to drive voting on congressional climate legislation. Looking at the case of tariffs on solar imports, I highlight how the clean technology trade issue produces a split in the economic interests of solar businesses, as solar manufacturers benefit from trade protections, whereas solar developers and installers stand to lose out. This split in clean energy interests provides rhetorical space for legislators to justify defecting from the party line. Accordingly, I find that legislators representing solar industry interests were more likely to defect from the party line – but only when they represent solar manufacturers.

The world is in the midst of upheaval resulting from existing institutions and power structures struggling to deal with new phenomena. In this dissertation, I examine how institutions and interests interact in the face of powerful environmental and technological changes.

The first project is an exploration of the relationship between natural resource dependence and environmental protection. I argue that because resource dependence causes environmental degradation, it can lead to political mobilization that results in greater protection. In democracies pro-protection pressures are more likely to influence policy, so adverse effects of resource dependence mainly apply to less democratic countries where extractive interests are more able to steer policymaking. To test this argument, I employ a novel panel regression discontinuity design at all terrestrial country-border pairs from 1992—2020, using geospatial data on protected area designation. I find that the effect of natural resource dependence on protected areas is conditional on democratic institutions.

The second project examines the effectiveness of international agreements in the face of biodiversity loss. The literature is mixed on whether international agreements are effective at producing domestic policy change, but there can be wide subnational variation in both policy changes and the strength of countervailing pressures. I apply this framework to protected areas. Using an original geospatial dataset on 846 ecoregions worldwide from 1992—2020, I find that when a democracy becomes more deeply embedded in the international environmental regime, it is more likely to protect more land. However, local economic pressures exert downward influence on protection.

The third project turns to technological change, focusing on the rise of the internet. My co-authors and I argue that the spread of the internet has contributed to recent trends in democratic backsliding, especially through its effect on political polarization. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large-n quantitative comparative analysis of democratic backsliding in 97 democracies with a typical case study to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. Together, the findings indicate that with growing access to the internet has come increased likelihood of democratic backsliding.

Over the last two decades, the global financial architecture has been fundamentally transformed. There has been a significant rise in bilateral currency swap agreements (BSAs) – either in place of or in conjunction with traditional multilateral lending. Despite their recent popularity, BSAs are not well understood as a form of monetary cooperation and exhibit a number of peculiarities that on face should be counterproductive for global financial stability. Conventional wisdom suggests that BSAs should be highly political and therefore, create perverse incentives for recipients to behave in economic mismanagement. Unlike IMF loans, however, BSAs lack any explicit conditionality to attenuate the moral hazard problem. What explains why providers would offer BSAs given these risks? Further, what are the consequences for global financial stability? I argue that rather than a source of enhanced risk-taking, geopolitics may enhance financial stability by enabling providers to offer swap agreements where they otherwise might be hesitant. I first present a formal model of the provider-recipient interaction that highlights additional risks that providers face when extending BSAs to recipients who decline economic reforms. In contrast to previous work, I demonstrate that providers can use political ties to manage these risks: international linkages enable providers to credibly threaten punishment and thereby induce better behavior from swap recipients. By leveraging the political ties of their home countries, providers can extend BSAs to recipients whose requests they would otherwise reject and can reduce the long-term risk of economic collapse and spillover. I provide empirical support for the mechanism using a newly-created dataset of all swap agreements offered by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the People’s Bank of China, and the Bank of Japan between 2000 and 2016.