Explaining environmental policy outcomes: The importance of electoral institutions in advanced industrial democracies.

The institutional organization of advanced democratic states has been shown to impact a variety of policy choices. This paper contends that electoral systems that utilize proportional representation and have large, multi-member districts should adopt climate change policy that is broader in scope, and perhaps more ambitious, than their majoritarian, single-member district counterparts. Furthermore, there appears to be a general trend, supported by both economists and politicians, away from command-and-control policy and toward market-based instruments in order to mitigate climate change. Market-based policies can range from broad-based carbon taxation to narrowly targeted green-certificate programs. This paper, therefore, specifically examines the way in which institutional organization affects the probability of adopting these different market-based environmental policies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]