Christian Jensen, Nadia Eldemerdash (both Political Science), and assistant teaching professor Steven Landis (Political Science, University of Notre Dame) have recently published new research in the that examines the relationship between vulnerability to climate change, political institutions and social unrest in Europe. As climate change continues to affect countries worldwide, scholars have begun considering the impact of environmental stress for political instability in industrialized countries. This paper analyzes the risk of social unrest in various European political systems in relation to the interaction of environmental stress and electoral institutions. The authors use a spatially and temporally disaggregated dataset to examine the possible relationships between environmental stress and social unrest in all European Union member countries from 2000 to 2020. The authors find that there are stark differences between the observed interaction of majoritarian electoral features and environmentally induced unrest in those European states with a history of Communist rule or climate vulnerability versus the rest of Europe. Overall, these results suggest that electoral systems play an important but heterogeneous role in the understanding of climate change and political unrest.
