Kellogg Institute Phd Fellow Bill Kakenmaster published an article titled “The Fossil-Fueled Roots of Climate Inaction in Authoritarian Regimes” in the journal Perspectives on Politics.
The article argues that the more money autocracies make from oil and gas production, the lesser the efforts they will put toward reduction of emissions. Kakenmaster cites the importance of “institutions that constrain unilateral executive action” as an establishment to help limit the impact of fossil fuel wealth in authoritarian regimes.
Kakenmaster gathered data from 108 authoritarian ruled countries on their emissions, oil and gas income, and executive constraints. In his study Kakenmaster uses GDP as a predictor of emissions in a variety of statistical tests to help establish a sensitivity analysis. This found that researchers would have to find dependent and independent variables four times stronger than GDP in order to prove their alternative explanations on why the contributions of some authoritarian regimes contribute more greatly to climate change than others.
Kakenmaster calls on political scientists to “get serious about researching climate change” as it is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity and highly intertwined with politics.
Bill Kakenmaster is a PhD candidate in comparative politics and methodology at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the politics of climate change and has been published in numerous journals regarding politics and the environment.
Read the Duck of Minerva “6+1 Questions” article about the paper here.