Climate change mitigation requires policies that are both effective and politically feasible, making policy design a crucial focus of comparative research. However, systematic cross-national data on design features have been scarce due to the resource-intensive nature of manual coding. This dataset, ClimateGen, addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive, harmonized, event-based classification of climate policy outputs. Building on the International Energy Agency (IEA) ‘Policies and Measures’ database, ClimateGen covers over 3,400 climate policy expansions across 23 affluent democracies from 1990 to 2022. To process the extensive unstructured textual data, the dataset leverages an innovative, reproducible pipeline powered by generative artificial intelligence. Specifically, it employs the Large Language Model GPT-4o, utilizing an iteratively refined prompt architecture rigorously validated against human expert coding. By employing multiple classification trials and leveraging the model’s parametric knowledge and emergent reasoning capabilities, the pipeline systematically infers latent distributive effects from sparse textual policy records. The core contribution of ClimateGen is its systematic categorization of climate policies along three theoretically grounded design dimensions: (1) Instrument choice, distinguishing between fiscal support and regulatory measures; (2) Target groups, separating consumer-oriented policies (highly salient to households) from broader economy-oriented measures; and (3) Distributive incidence, identifying whether consumer policies allocate costs and benefits in a progressive or regressive manner across income strata. By quantifying these micro-level design choices, ClimateGen provides a unique empirical yardstick. It enables researchers to benchmark national climate policy portfolios, examine the trade-offs between political feasibility and equity, and empirically test theories of distributive politics, policy feedback, policy expansion, and climate policy sequencing.
Total Universe / Complete enumeration
ObservationObservation
BeobachtungObservation
