Government political ideology and green innovation: evidence from OECD countries

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the relationship between government political ideology and green innovation. We employ data on 20 democratic countries with multi-party systems between 2010 and 2018. Green innovation is measured by the total patents in environment-related technologies. We find a negative relationship between left-leaning government and green innovation, suggesting that leftist governments are associated with low green innovations. This finding is consistent with the political assumption that leftist governments resist technological advancement because it may cause unemployment, whereas rightist promotes technological advancement to benefit the capitalist. We also find that the effect of political ideology remains the same during electoral years, implying that elections do not present any pressure on parties to change their course towards green innovation. Our result implies that partisan politics matters in finding solutions to unending environmental challenges. The results are robust to alternative measurements of variables and econometric identification strategies.