Do local parties only mind their own business? Explaining the deployment of large-scale solar energy projects in Germany

While the literature on community acceptance of renewable energy projects has largely focused on public acceptance, the factors behind the political approval of renewable energy projects by local decision-makers have remained largely unexplored. In this article, we address this gap by investigating the relationship between the party composition of local parliaments, national election results and deployment of large-scale solar energy projects focusing empirically on the German Federal State of Bavaria during 2008–2020. We find that the party composition of the local parliaments in Bavaria has a strong and robust effect on the likelihood that a municipality will witness the implementation of solar parks. We particularly find that the major negative effect on the deployment of solar parks is associated with the strong presence of the independent local parties in the local parliaments. The success of the Green Party and the far-right populists in national elections has found to be less relevant for the local solar park deployment.