The Electoral Impact of Housing Climate Policy: Evidence from Germany

Abstract The transition to carbon-neutral residential heating poses extraordinary policy challenges to societies in Europe and beyond. In this paper, we study the electoral consequences of an amendment to the German Building Energy Act (GEG) aimed at phasing-out fossil-based heating systems. We use granular building stock data to approximate heterogeneity in household compliance costs and apply difference-in-differences and triple difference models to estimate its impacts on vote shares at the municipal level. For the state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, we find relative gains for the far-right (+2.4 pp) and conservative opposition parties (+6.5 pp) and losses for the incumbent federal government parties (−2.9 pp) in the baseline specification of our model. For the latter two, the effects are more pronounced in rural municipalities. These findings highlight the importance of holistic climate policy approaches that account for salient and heterogeneous costs to mitigate political backlash.