Publication type
Journal Article
Author
Publication date
June 1, 2022
Summary:
In the fight against climate change, renewable energy has been subsidised in many countries. With the costs passed onto consumers, governments are paying those, for example, who instal domestic solar panels on top of their homes and feed electricity back into the system at preferential rates. We know that substantial amounts of income flow into households with solar installations as a result, but we do not know much about the political consequences of these programmes. Similar government programmes are known to have resource and interpretative effects on participants, leading to changes in their attitudes. Drawing on three longitudinal surveys from Germany, United Kingdom, and Switzerland, this article analyses whether installation of these solar panels causes meaningful changes in households’ various political attitudes. Using fixed-effect models as the identification strategy, the article reports null results – solar installations do not seem to generate political attitudes. This is good as well as bad news for actors looking to increase the amount of renewable energy produced through solar installations.
Published in
Political Studies Review
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 20 , p.525 -533
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211044868
ISSN
14789299
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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