About

Paasha Mahdavi is an Associate Professor and the Acting Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with an affiliation at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. She is also the Director of the Energy Governance and Political Economy (EGAPE) Lab and a co-founder of The 2035 Initiative at UCSB. Her research focuses on the impact of oil and gas resources on governance and environmental politics, driven by core questions about the role of government in industry and the design of firm strategies and government policies that will mitigate climate change. Her research areas include comparative political economy, energy and environmental politics, and climate policy. Mahdavi is the author of "Power Grab: Political Survival Through Extractive Resource Nationalization" (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores how dictators maintain power by seizing control of oil, metals, and minerals production. Other projects she works on examine oil-firm strategies to transition in a carbon-constrained world, the political economy of fossil fuel subsidies, the politics of methane abatement, public opinion on oil-related policy, transnational corruption in the oil sector, the impact of oil revenues on electoral politics, resource expropriation's effect on labor rights, applied Bayesian statistical analysis, and mapping elite dynamics using statistical network analysis. Before joining UCSB, Mahdavi was an assistant professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.S. in statistics from UCLA, an M.A. in international energy policy from Stanford, and a B.A. with departmental honors in economics from Columbia University. She has served as a non-resident fellow at the Initiative for Sustainable Energy at Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines, as the GFC Fellow for the Council on the Future of Energy at the World Economic Forum, and as a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Economics
• Finance
• Market economy
• Public economics
• Law
• Economic policy
• Natural resource economics
• Waste management
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Limited impacts of shareholder pressure on climate strategy of fossil firms

  Business and Politics · 2026-03-04

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Transitioning away from fossil fuels is in the best interest for long-term stakeholders of oil firms to mitigate risk from climate policy. Yet firms have an informational and positional advantage over strategies to mitigate climate-related risks, such that there is little incentive to decarbonize. Building on theories of firm behavior and the three faces of political power, we argue that investor pressure will be unlikely to change the climate strategy of fossil fuel firms. To measure climate strategy, we develop a novel technique using natural language processing tools to parse annual filings of all publicly-listed oil firms in the US. Using a difference-in-differences design exploiting an exogenous shock to shareholder power from a Securities and Exchange Commission regulatory amendment, we find no effects of shareholder pressure on deep reforms to climate strategies and weak effects on incremental pro-climate behavior. Through a case study of ExxonMobil, we show that climate-motivated investors are unable to overcome internal stakeholder resistance, despite shareholder pressure through direct communication, filed resolutions, and media campaigns. Our findings illustrate that polluting firms remain resistant to financial pressure for decarbonization, suggesting an important role for policy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fossil fuel subsidy reforms have become more fragile

  Nature Climate Change · 2025-03-26 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How publics in small-island states view climate change and international responses to it

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-07-25 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Climate change caused by carbon pollution from the world's largest economies poses an existential threat to small-island states and territories this century. These places bear virtually no responsibility for climate change but will face sea-level rise, fresh water resource degradation, and intensified storms that will kill or dislocate exposed publics, and damage local economies. To alleviate this crisis, the global community has begun discussing who is responsible for climate mitigation and adaptation costs for those affected by climate change, in addition to continued debates around the distribution of responsibility for climate change. Missing from this analysis, however, are systematic efforts to elicit the preferences and perceptions of publics in these threatened small-island states and territories. Here, we report results from a large-sample (n [Formula: see text] 14,710) cross-national survey of publics living in climate-vulnerable states and territories, conducted in June-July 2022. By quota sampling through Facebook's ad platform, we generate survey samples at the national or territorial level for publics in 55 small-island states, territories, and subnational regions in the South Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Caribbean. We find widespread awareness and concern about the threat posed by climate change and sea-level rise, in contrast to what existing research finds in the Global North. We also find that climate-vulnerable publics believe their home governments, large polluters, and former colonial powers are all responsible for helping to manage the climate crisis, irrespective of these actors' relative carbon emissions. These findings fill an important gap by depicting climate beliefs among the communities at the frontlines of climate change.

  PublisherDOI

• Government efforts to reduce fossil fuel subsidies have failed at a very high rate

  Nature Climate Change · 2025-04-21 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A network model of creditor coordination

  Review of International Political Economy · 2025-11-20

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reforms Have Grown More Fragile Since the Paris Conference

  Research Square · 2024-10-09

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reply to van den Bergh and Savin: Fossil fuel taxes are politically hard to change

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023-03-27

  articleOpen access

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.

  PublisherDOI

• Examining the effect of cost information and framing on support for methane regulations in Europe

  Environmental Research Letters · 2023-08-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Methane abatement policies will play an important role in mitigating climate change given the high global-warming potential of methane compared to carbon dioxide. Yet evidence on public attitudes and support for methane regulations is lacking. In partnership with the Clean Air Task Force, we develop an original nationally representative survey of four European countries ( N = 5629) to show variation in public opinions about methane emissions and policy to reduce them. Using a framing experiment, we test variation in these preferences as a function of policy impacts on cost, global climate change, local pollution, or energy security. We find largely null effects across the board: attitudes are remarkably durable to varying treatments, suggesting that support for methane regulations is not sensitive to cost information and policy framing. The results from this survey provide a much-needed baseline for public attitudes about methane abatement and will inform existing debates on what information is and is not effective in generating support for ambitious methane policy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effects of per capita payments on governance: evidence from tribal casinos

  Public Choice · 2022-11-06 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Political leadership has limited impact on fossil fuel taxes and subsidies

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022-11-14 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access

  For countries to rapidly decarbonize, they need strong leadership, according to both academic studies and popular accounts. But leadership is difficult to measure, and its importance is unclear. We use original data to investigate the role of presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs in 155 countries from 1990 to 2015 in changing their countries' gasoline taxes and subsidies. Our findings suggest that the impact of leaders on fossil fuel taxes and subsidies is surprisingly limited and often ephemeral. This holds true regardless of the leader's age, gender, education, or political ideology. Rulers who govern during an economic crisis perform no better or worse than other rulers. Even presidents and prime ministers who were recognized by the United Nations for environmental leadership had no more success than other leaders in reducing subsidies or raising fuel taxes. Where leaders appear to play an important role-primarily in countries with large subsidies-their reforms often failed, with subsidies returning to prereform levels within the first 12 mo 62% of the time, and within 5 y 87% of the time. Our findings suggest that leaders of all types find it exceptionally hard to raise the cost of fossil fuels for consumers. To promote deep decarbonization, leaders are likely to have more success with other types of policies, such as reducing the costs and increasing the availability of renewable energy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Steven Smith

  18 shared

• Matthew Cravens

  9 shared

• James Egan

  9 shared

• Jyl Josephson

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  9 shared

• Jessica Carew

  Ford Foundation

  9 shared

• M. Leigh

  University of Geneva

  9 shared

• Tomohisa Hattori

  Tsumura Research Institute (Japan)

  9 shared

• Laura Bures

  Carnegie Corporation of New York

  9 shared

Education

• PhD, Political Science

  University of California Los Angeles

  2015