Dokshin Fedor A
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON Canada.
NPJ Clim Action. 2024;3(1):83. doi: 10.1038/s44168-024-00164-8. Epub 2024 Oct 7.
Climate advocates look optimistically to policy feedback as a mechanism for locking-in a decarbonization policy trajectory, but little research has examined whether and how climate legislation creates constituencies that could provide future political support. This article focuses on incentive programs supporting investment in solar PV and the potential for policy feedback through participating households. We first develop a framework of feedback potential that considers the and of incentive program beneficiaries and their across electoral districts. We then apply the framework to New York State's solar PV incentive program, which enabled over 140,000 households to install solar PV. We find that the number of solar PV incentive beneficiaries is positively associated with Republican vote share, suggesting potential for a strong pro-solar constituency in the pivotal, Republican-led districts. Within electoral districts, however, beneficiaries skew Democratic, raising questions about the direction of policy feedback. The results carry implications for the kind of politics that incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act may set in motion in the coming years.
气候倡导者乐观地将政策反馈视为锁定脱碳政策轨迹的一种机制，但很少有研究探讨气候立法是否以及如何创造能够提供未来政治支持的选民群体。本文聚焦于支持太阳能光伏投资的激励计划以及通过参与家庭实现政策反馈的潜力。我们首先构建了一个反馈潜力框架，该框架考虑了激励计划受益者的特征和分布以及他们在各选区的情况。然后我们将该框架应用于纽约州的太阳能光伏激励计划，该计划使超过14万户家庭安装了太阳能光伏。我们发现，太阳能光伏激励计划的受益者数量与共和党选票份额呈正相关，这表明在由共和党主导的关键选区存在形成强大的亲太阳能选民群体的潜力。然而，在各选区内，受益者倾向于民主党，这引发了关于政策反馈方向的问题。这些结果对《降低通胀法案》中的激励措施在未来几年可能引发的政治格局具有启示意义。
