According to the OECD, energy taxes are the best way to change people’s energy consumption behaviour in the long run and a necessary tool towards decarbonisation (OECD 2016). Yet, energy taxes have, in fact, been declining in most West European countries, especially in the last decade. Why have economically advanced democracies not increased the cost of energy consumption?

We argue that governments, of both the left and the right, have become less willing to hike energy taxes because they fear the political backlash against energy taxes. To understand the potential electoral consequences of raising energy taxes, we need to better understand the policy preferences of parties’ core constituents but also the electoral competition mainstream parties face, both from the right and the left.

This paper makes three contributions: first, it theorises and investigates parties’ ‘vulnerability’ to energy taxes both internally and externally. Internally, it looks at how divisive energy taxes are for the party’s core electorates, using ESS survey data. Second, looking from an inter-party perspective at external pressures it investigates the extent to which radical right parties systematically diverge in their positions on energy taxes compared to mainstream parties by analysing parliamentary speeches across European countries. Third, it tests the role of electoral competition on environmental taxes both in EU countries using Eurostat data as well as in a larger sample of advanced democracies using IMF data on environmental taxes.