Politics or need? Explaining state climate change policy adoption, 2007–2016

Abstract As climate change grows in importance on state policy agendas around the country, state responses are brought into focus. States may choose to address climate change through legislative action, executive order, administrative action, or not at all. Our research seeks to determine the state factors that lead states to favor one path to action over another. To this end, we test three explanations: a political explanation that focuses on political factors present within a state; a contextual model, and a policy need explanation that focuses on a state's vulnerability to the deleterious effects of climate change. We control for a variety of economic, social, geographic, and demographic variables in all models. We find that legislative and executive decisions tend to be driven by political considerations, although modified by extreme need.