Justice in the spotlight: Do parliamentary debates shape Germany's energy transition?

As the energy transition picks up pace, the side effects of energy policies are gaining political prominence. In recent years, the costs and, especially, the distributive effects of energy policy have climbed the political agenda, with debates increasingly focusing on the justice effects alongside the effectiveness of policy measures. Here, we explore the role of justice arguments in parliamentary energy policy debates and how they have affected legislation even before they affect the population. We do this for two cases of German energy policy by observing how parliamentarians debate the distributive justice effects of energy transition measures and tracing how their arguments affected legislation. We show that parliamentary debates, especially the more intense and controversial ones, featured strong use of justice arguments, and that both laws subsequently changed along the lines of several of those arguments. Simultaneously, we observe that debates were, in part, symbolic, signaling opposition rather than truly seeking to affect the laws. We conclude that justice-based argumentation is common and strong in parliamentary debates on energy policy, and that these arguments do affect legislation.