Alexander F. Gazmararian

Biography

Alexander F. Gazmararian is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, where he researches and teaches about the politics of climate change. His latest book is Climate Fault Lines.

He just launched the Climate Policy Workshop at the University of Michigan, an interdisciplinary space for faculty to workshop their social science research on climate change policy and politics.

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Uncertain Futures

How to Unlock the Climate Impasse

(with Dustin Tingley) Cambridge University Press. The Politics of Climate Change Series. 2023.

Why is the world not moving fast enough to solve the climate crisis? Politics stand in the way, but experts hope that green investments, compensation, and retraining could unlock the impasse. However, these measures often lack credibility. Not only do communities fear these policies could be reversed, but they have seen promises broken before.

Uncertain Futures proposes solutions to make more credible promises that build support for the energy transition. It examines the perspectives of workers, communities, and companies, arguing that the climate impasse is best understood by viewing the problem from the ground up.

Featuring voices on the front lines such as a commissioner in Carbon County deciding whether to welcome wind, executives at energy companies searching for solutions, mayors and unions in Minnesota battling for local jobs, and fairgoers in coal country navigating their uncertain future, this book contends that making economic transitions work means making promises credible.

Awards & Recognition

Don K. Price Award - Best book on science, technology, and politics published in the last year (American Political Science Association, 2024)
Arnold Vedlitz Award - Seminal book on environmental issues published in the past two years (Southern Political Science Association, 2023)
Best Book on the Energy Market Economy (American Energy Society, 2023)

Press Coverage

Good Authority Resources Radio Harvard Business School The Harvard Gazette Political Science Quarterly Resources for the Future

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Book Cover - Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse

Climate Fault Lines

The New Political Economy of a Warming World

(with Helen V. Milner) Princeton University Press. 2026.

Climate Fault Lines explores how climate change is affecting politics today and what our future holds in a warmer world. It places global warming's physical perils at the heart of climate politics, unlike theories focused on collective action or interest group resistance. The core claim is that climate change's unequal effects—a fault line cutting across existing social, economic, and political divides—will produce diverging political responses as the climate changes. People, businesses, and governments on the more vulnerable side of the fault line are most motivated to address climate change. This view departs from prevailing wisdom, such as the idea that Northern European states are climate leaders whereas developing nations are free riders. Above the fault line, when climate policy advances, it's not because these regions face the greatest danger, but because it delivers cleaner air, economic gains, or greater energy security, below the fault line, intensifying damage is what forces political action.

The book traces how these fault lines are emerging in domestic and international politics. It brings together models from geosciences and economics with diverse data on the public, businesses, cities, and countries. As warming accelerates, people and businesses with the most to lose are mobilizing, reshaping the incentives and policies of local and national governments. The result is growing divergence across the fault line. The world is not in the same boat: social harm, not shared vulnerability, increasingly shapes climate politics.

Articles

The Political Economy of the Clean Energy Transition

(with Dustin Tingley) Annual Review of Political Science. Forthcoming.

Why are some countries more successful at advancing the clean energy transition than others? Existing research, centered on industrialized democracies, often frames international collective action against domestic distributive explanations. This review synthesizes many previous comparative and international explanations in a credibility framework that clarifies when governments can reduce opposition and create climate coalitions. Applying it to both developed and developing countries reveals how institutions, state capacity, and global constraints jointly shape decarbonization trajectories and suggests a new research agenda for the political economy of climate change.

Public Opinion Foundations of the Clean Energy Transition

(with Matto Mildenberger and Dustin Tingley) Environmental Politics. 2025. Forthcoming.

Popular debates about political barriers to the energy transition increasingly acknowledge the mass public's role, but often summarize its importance with amorphous concepts like "political" or "public will." This essay clarifies how the public's beliefs, preferences, and behaviors affect the clean energy transition through three channels: policymaker incentives, electoral selection, and technology adoption and siting. In turn, we consider how energy and climate policy design can influence mass public preferences, emphasizing cost and benefit visibility, public perceptions of distributional effects, and cross-domain policy linkages. Drawing from our framework, we outline priorities for public opinion research on the clean energy transition.

Sources of Partisan Change: Evidence from the Shale Gas Shock in American Coal Country

The Journal of Politics. 2025.

What explains the shift to Republicans in places that historically voted for Democrats? This paper tests a new explanation for part of this reversal. The shale gas revolution displaced coal, which intensified the salience of national environmental regulations and increased support for Republican presidential candidates. Analysis of presidential elections from 1972 to 2020 with a difference-in-differences design finds that the shale gas shock increased Republican presidential vote share by 4.9 percentage points. Geospatial data, media analysis, and interviews show that voters blamed environmental regulations for their community's decline and that the backlash was more likely to occur where the shale shock was least visible. The attribution of blame for economic dislocation helps to explain electoral behavior in places "left behind," and sheds light on political responses to climate policy.

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Press Coverage

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Valuing the Future: Changing Time Horizons and Policy Preferences

Political Behavior. 2024.

The short time horizons of citizens are a prominent explanation for why governments fail to tackle significant long-term public policy problems. Evidence for the influence of time horizons is mixed, complicated by the difficulty of determining how attitudes would differ if individuals were more concerned about the future. This paper approaches the challenge by leveraging a personal experience that leads people to place more value on the future: parenthood. The analysis compares new parents with otherwise similar individuals using a matched difference-in-differences design with a three-wave panel. The results show that parenthood increases support for stopping climate change. Falsification tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this shift in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing valuations of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.

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Press Coverage

Marginal Revolution

Political Cleavages and Changing Exposure to Global Warming

(with Helen V. Milner) Comparative Political Studies. 2024.

Why do some countries pass laws to reduce emissions that cause climate change while others do not? We theorize that climate change-related disasters cause politicians to view global warming as more proximate, but whether they have incentives to enact mitigation laws depends on their country's geographic vulnerability to future damages. We use a spatial integrated assessment model to measure global warming's local economic effects, which allows us to predict how political leaders respond to disasters based on their vulnerability. An analysis of mitigation laws from 1990–2020 in 155 countries shows that only governments in locations facing the greatest future climate damage react to disasters by passing mitigation policies. Distinct from the historical North-South divide, our findings highlight a growing geographic cleavage in national responses to climate change.

Replication Package

Fossil Fuel Communities Support Climate Policy Coupled With Just Transition Assistance

Energy Policy. 2024.

What are fossil fuel communities' preferences over the design of just transition assistance accompanying climate policy? This study conducted survey experiments at Appalachian county fairs to answer this question, overcoming barriers that have limited previous attempts to measure preferences in these crucial regions. Comparing the responses to a new national survey, there is a divergence in preferences for policies encouraging relocation, but there is convergence behind support for policies that reduce costs to fossil fuel workers. The study also finds that an intervention to provide information about coal's decline shifted preferences toward supporting the clean energy transition. Rather than public opinion being an immutable barrier to climate action, 66% of fossil fuel community residents would endorse climate policy if it were coupled with just transition assistance. Policy design and informational interventions could help to create climate coalitions, even in the places most affected by the clean energy transition.

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Reimagining Net Metering: A Polycentric Model for Equitable Solar Adoption in the United States

(with Dustin Tingley) Energy Research & Social Science. 2024.

Disparities in renewable energy deployment disproportionately afflict marginalized communities and slow the clean energy transition necessary to combat climate change. Most solutions focus on top-down government initiatives to subsidize renewable energy. However, this approach has had mixed efficacy, raises questions about the durability of support, and lacks political feasibility in certain contexts. We propose a new energy development model that leverages the logic of polycentric governance, which refers to having multiple centers of decision-making as opposed to one. Our model rethinks the practice of net metering, where households and organizations can sell excess power back to the grid. Rather than pocketing the proceeds, our model taps into individual altruism by allowing households and organizations to donate some of this money to build renewable energy for underserved communities. This could accelerate clean energy development by providing resources and fostering collaboration between communities and power companies. Our framework represents a novel decentralized approach to a "just energy transition" that complements government-led initiatives. This paper describes the program, discusses design issues, and presents proof-of-concept survey research from the United States.

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Working Papers

Experience and Self-Interest: Diverging Responses to Global Warming1/13/25

(with Helen V. Milner) Conditionally accepted at American Journal of Political Science

People are increasingly feeling global warming's effects through extreme heat and natural disasters. How do these climate shocks affect political attitudes? We argue that the effect of climate-related experiences depends significantly on self-interest. People in more vulnerable locations are more likely to respond to climate shocks with greater concern and more support for mitigation policy. We test this argument with a macroeconomic model of climate change, geospatial data on climate shocks, and survey data of 148,712 people across 137 countries, and over time with the same 9,500 individuals in the United States. The results show that climate shocks heighten risk perceptions and lead to greater support for mitigation policies only among people in climate-vulnerable places. This responsiveness to experience is most evident in democratic countries and among people whose livelihoods depend on the weather. Integrating political economy and behavioral theories helps to explain how political attitudes change.

Driving Labor Apart: Climate Policy Backlash in the American Auto Corridor8/23/24

(with Lewis Krashinsky)

What are green industrial policy's electoral effects? There has been a global resurgence in industrial policy on the premise that it sidesteps voter opposition. But we argue that industrial policy can cause backlash when it has unequal effects within sectors. Communities that face job threats should vote for politicians who oppose the energy transition. We leverage disaggregated data to identify counties with jobs at risk from vehicle electrification spurred by industrial policy. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the EV transition increased Republican presidential vote share by 2.5 percentage points in vulnerable counties compared to the matched control group. Rather than the national union stemming backlash by unifying labor and the left, our interviews show how local unions provided information that reinforced worker fears. Climate reforms with unequal effects undermine industrial policy's political logic and cut new cleavages between left parties and the working class.

Press Coverage

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Teaching

POLSCI 498: The Political Economy of Climate Change

Fall 2025. Undergraduate.

Why is it challenging to stop climate change? The first half of the course examines global warming's political, economic, and societal consequences. The second half turns to the politics of solving the problem at local, national, and global scales. The readings weave together political science, economics, psychology, and philosophy. By the end, you should have a clearer understanding of why global warming is hard to solve and what we can do.

POLSCI 688: The Political Economy of Climate Change

Fall 2025. Graduate.

This course reviews theoretical frameworks for understanding the political economy of climate change and explores new research on this topic.