Political Institutions, Energy Transitions, and Air Quality: Evidence from Global Urban Areas

What explains that some countries and cities provide more local environmental public goods, such as good air quality, than others? Research in political science has emphasized the relevance of macro-level institutional variables, in particular regime type, to explain urban environmental outcomes. Recently, the global policy efforts to mitigate climate change have transformed energy systems worldwide, therefore affecting one of the key drivers of air pollution. Despite the implications of the energy transition, we know little about its consequences at the local level. In this paper, I study how political and climate-policy changes affect air quality. To do so, I employ data on mortality rates associated with air pollution, proximity to coal infrastructure, and exposure to political regime change for a sample of 12,990 metropolitan areas worldwide. I find that cities in countries that experienced instances of democratization and those located close to retiring coal power plants had substantial decreases in mortality rates associated with particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide. Moreover, I show that the rate of coal infrastructure retirement is associated with the overall climate policy effort of a country. My findings suggest that, in addition to its global implications, the energy transition has crucial local public health impacts, particularly among urban populations; therefore, climate policy is a crucial element to understand variation in local environmental public goods globally.