Renewable energy and politics: A systematic review and new evidence

This paper reviews the literature in the intersection of renewable energies and politics adopting a multidisciplinary social sciences perspective. We begin by analyzing the recent literature dealing with renewable energies and politics, illustrating the analysis with bibliometric data. The search protocol revealed 853 contributions dated from 1998. Then we focus on the 186 contributions approached from a social sciences perspective, establishing a taxonomy to classify the contributions into the main issues covered. We identify contributions dealing with governance, with public acceptance, with markets and prices, and with political or policy determinants of renewable energies. In an empirical application we show that more democratic countries tend to invest more in renewable energies, taking into account other determinants (e.g. income, energy dependence, pollution emissions) of this investment.