Voting for the Green Party gives you a quick boost in solar power, but weirdly enough, it causes the total capacity to drop in the long run.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
From Votes to Megawatts: Policy Outcomes of Local Elections
SSRN · 6464019
The Takeaway
You would expect pro-environmental political wins to have a compounding or at least stable effect on renewable energy. However, the study found a long-term reversal, where initial gains in solar capacity were eventually wiped out, primarily due to a decline in residential solar installations.
From the abstract
Do democratic elections affect policy outcomes, and how do these effects evolve over time? Existing evidence is mixed, focusing on federal elections in two-party systems using RDDs. We study municipal elections in Germany’s multiparty system, examining how electoral support for the pro-environmental Green Party affects photovoltaic power capacity investment. Exploiting quasi-random variation generated by staggered elections, we implement a triple difference-in-differences design using panel data