Accelerating the global transition to renewable electricity is critical for achieving climate targets, yet progress remains uneven across countries. This study examines the role of political institutional quality in shaping renewable electricity deployment. A review of recent literature identifies key conceptual and empirical gaps. Using a panel of 75 developed and emerging and developing countries from 1990 to 2018, we conduct an in-depth empirical analysis incorporating both composite and disaggregated measures of political institutional quality, alongside the moderating effect of regional political-administrative authority. We further compare the effects of institutional improvements across different development contexts. Our findings indicate that aggregate measures of institutional quality obscure heterogeneous effects among their components. In emerging and developing economies, corruption control is positively associated with renewable electricity deployment, particularly under low to moderate levels of regional authority. Conversely, higher bureaucratic quality may hinder deployment, potentially due to regulatory complexity. In developed countries, democratic accountability emerges as a key driver, especially in moderately decentralized systems. These results underscore the conditional and context-specific nature of institutional effects, suggesting that policy interventions must align institutional reforms with governance structures to effectively support renewable electricity expansion.
