When Ambition Meets Asymmetry: The Political Economy of Post-Trump Climate Governance

The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017 marked a critical rupture in global climate governance, prompting advanced economies to reassess their regulatory commitments. This study examines how OECD democracies responded to the erosion of U.S. climate leadership, focusing on the political economy of environmental policy stringency. Using two-way fixed effects panel regressions from 1990 to 2020, the analysis reveals a general increase in environmental policy stringency following the U.S. retreat, but with substantial cross-national variation. Countries with greater trade dependence on the United States exhibited weaker regulatory responses, suggesting that economic interdependence constrained climate ambition. These findings highlight a core tension between normative leadership and structural vulnerability in an open-economy context. This study contributes to theories of international cooperation and regulatory politics by showing how reputational incentives and trade asymmetries jointly shape national responses to hegemonic withdrawal from multilateral regimes.