International audienceThis paper empirically analyzes how political factors affect the deployment of renewable energy (RE) sources and compares their explanatory power to that of other economic, energy and environmental drivers that have received greater attention in the literature so far. The sample encompasses the EU countries bound to attain the target of 20% share of gross final energy consumption by 2020. The panel data analysis shows that lobbying by the manufacturing industry negatively affects RE deployment, whereas standard measures of government quality show a positive effect; furthermore left wing parties promote the deployment of RE more than right wing ones

Political competition, Growth, Redistribution, Regional government, D78, H71, H72, O17,

This paper reconsiders the effects of fiscal federalism on the size of government: the Leviathan hypothesis, suggesting a negative relationship between fiscal decentralization and government growth, has been recently enriched by theoretical and empirical research that points out at the importance of distinguishing between grants and own resources to gauge the effects of fiscal decentralization on public sector size; moreover, several additional economic, demographic and political control variables have been proved to be empirically relevant. This paper improves on this literature by distinguishing long from short run relationships by means of appropriate panel cointegration techniques.JEL code: H11, H53, H77