Andrea di Benedetto

State-of-the-art Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) often overlook the political constraints that shape climate-policy implementation. Although these models evaluate mitigation pathways, they rarely account for whether policies can be introduced, maintained, or reversed under pressure from public opinion and vested industry interests. In this paper, we integrate political dynamics into the Dystopian Schumpeter-Keynes (DSK) model by combining the election model of Di Benedetto et al. (2025) with the opinion-dynamics approach of Lackner et al. (2024). The resulting framework links public opinion, electoral outcomes, climate-policy implementation, and economic feedbacks. Households form political preferences in response to economic conditions, perceived climate change, lobbying pressure, and social interactions, and vote every four model years for either a Green party, which supports climate policy, or a Brown party, which does not. We compare climate-policy packages across different socio-political settings and assess their robustness to backlash and lobbying resistance. The results show that political feasibility is a key determinant of whether decarbonization succeeds or fails.