The politics of contemporary ethno‐nationalist conflicts

That the 1990s began and ended with wars in the Balkans, often evoking reference to ‘ancient hatreds’, might suggest little has been learned since the fall of the Wall on how to address the recrudescence of violent ethno‐nationalist conflict – and indeed some fatalism as to whether this can be done at all. Yet the rethinking of notions of national sovereignty, the increasing minority‐rights jurisprudence and the development of anti‐essentialist concepts of identity in recent times have begun to indicate new policy instruments which might better allow such conflicts to be managed in the twenty‐first century. As ever, however, policy lags behind intellectual innovations, and the predominant approach of the international community remains for the moment significantly more conservative in character.     

Who Are Your Neighbors? The Role of Ideology and Decline of Geographic Proximity in the Diffusion of Policy Innovations

States adopt policy innovations within the confines of a dynamic American federal system, but our study of policy diffusion tends to be fairly static. Single‐policy studies incorporate temporal variation, but for only one innovation. Macro‐level analyses examine broad patterns, but often by completely pooling across policy and time. This makes it difficult to identify how diffusion patterns change over time, though Walker's early work explicitly identified such temporal instability. This study specifically examines how neighbor and ideological cues change in importance over time using a dataset of 556 policies adopted from 1960 to 2014. While the findings demonstrate the generality of many key internal, external, and policy‐level determinants of adoption, there is variation in these effects across time. Most important is the relative stability of ideological similarity between adopters and declining influence of contiguous neighbors. Further, political polarization plays a role in conditioning neighbor and ideological cues.     

The Tension Between Policy Science and Politics: Addressing Cancer Incidence and Environmental Contamination in Michigan

The Internet and related innovations in information and communications technologies now enable individuals and groups from across a state to easily access and analyze data on public health and environmental contamination. In Michigan, will this improve the policy attention given to rural, as well as urban and suburban, areas of the state? Will better‐informed citizen voices result in policy decisions that take longer‐term considerations into account and are more representative of the interests of all areas of the state? This article suggests not. The recent adoption of lifetime legislative term limits in Michigan and the complexity of and public misunderstandings about the research process and data analysis likely will make legislative work on environmental policy more difficult and contentious.     

Dancing to the Rhythms of the Fossil Fuel Landscape: Landscape Inertia and the Temporal Limits to Market‐Based Climate Policy

This article makes a contribution to the critique of market‐based mechanisms for climate and energy policy. It explores the environmental effectiveness of market instruments by engaging a broadly conceived “fossil fuel landscape”, or the material, social, and political inertia of fossil energy dependence, as a factor delimiting policy outcomes. The argument is developed through a focus on the idea of economic efficiency as a key ideological construct underlying market‐based policy, and draws on examples from two different market instruments, namely the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme. I argue that an understanding of the shortcomings of these, and similar, policies requires acknowledgment of the political and socio‐economic power that emanates from the temporal dynamics of fossil fuel capitalism, which are reproduced when economic efficiency becomes the key focus of climate policy.     

Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and the Diffusion of Innovations

This article builds on punctuated equilibrium theory to evaluate the diffusion of public policy innovations in the United States. The article argues that punctuated equilibrium theory provides a unifying framework for understating three mechanisms leading to the diffusion of innovations: gradual policy diffusion driven by incremental policy emulation, rapid state‐to‐state diffusion driven by policy imitation and mimicking, and nearly immediate policy diffusion driven by state‐level responses to a common exogenous shock. Drawing upon the Bass mixed influence diffusion model, this research generates measures of the coefficients of external and internal influences for diffusion for 81 public policy innovations that have spread across the United States. The article then evaluates how the policy image and direct participation of the federal government contribute to distinct patterns of diffusion over time.     

Human environmental interactions in Upper Lapland,Finland: Development of participatory research strategies

The paper outlines strategies for participatory research by comparing the results of a participatory workshop on research needs in human‐environmental interaction in Finnish Lapland with an analysis of official Finnish policy documents on the same subject. The workshop was organized in Anár/Inari, Finland in October 1997 as part of the Human Environmental Interactions theme (HEI) of the European Commission's Arctic‐Alpine Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Initiative (ARTERI). The mandate of ARTERI was to develop research themes and encourage their implementation to allow for discussions among local residents, natural and social scientists, and policy‐makers concerned with environmental protection and management in arctic and alpine regions of Europe. The objective of the Anár/Inari workshop was to discuss central issues of human‐environmental interaction in the region in a participatory mode with local interest groups, generate alternative scenarios for the region, and develop research and development project proposals on the basis of the scenarios. The paper discusses the scenarios and the project proposals that the workshop developed, and compares them with official Finnish policies on forestry and reindeer management in Lapland. From methodological and theoretical perspectives, the workshop was a unique empirical setting within which to investigate the dynamic interaction between traditional and modern knowledge sets on human‐environmental interaction. From the policy perspective, the comparison of workshop recommendations and official policies offers valuable indications for future directions in participatory policy‐making in the region and novel ways of balancing the conflicting demands on environmental resources, such as reindeer management, forestry, and tourism.     

Does Policy Diffusion Need Space? Spatializing the Dynamics of Policy Diffusion

For decades, scholars in multiple disciplines have examined spatial diffusion, or the spatiotemporal properties associated with the diffusion of innovations. These properties include contagious, hierarchical, and relocation diffusion. Each of these refers to a spatial model that epitomizes how innovations spread among geographic locations. Policy diffusion, a separate but homologous research tradition, had its theoretical underpinnings in spatial diffusion. However, contemporary policy diffusion has focused largely on mechanism‐based diffusion. This article demonstrates how exploratory spatial data analysis can be used to uncover spatial policy diffusion properties. In this study, municipal smoking regulation adoptions, religious‐based initiatives, and bag ban and bag fees are examined. This study finds evidence that for each policy more than one property is occurring; therefore, this study proposes that a hybrid model best explains diffusion. This article demonstrates how examining spatial diffusion properties, in addition to diffusion mechanisms, can improve the conceptualization of diffusion theories, enhance mechanism or theory‐based specification of diffusion models, and unravel the specific regional or neighboring causal pathways linking policies between adopting jurisdictions.     

Toward a Comparative Measure of Climate Policy Output

Comparative policy studies face a number of methodological challenges where conceptualization of the object of comparison—policy output—is the most fundamental. On the basis of three common approaches of the study of policy output, we reconsider this widely applied concept and propose a refined measure as a function of both density (number of policy instruments) and intensity (content of policy instruments). We theoretically derive six policy‐intensity measures (objectives, scope, integration, budget, implementation, and monitoring), which are used for weighting national policy instruments on an Index of Climate Policy Activity. The article presents an empirical application of this measurement approach. Focusing on national climate policy instruments in the energy production sector in Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we investigate changes in the countries' policy portfolios from 1998 to 2010. The article demonstrates that our Index of Climate Policy Activity provides a reliable and valid measurement for national policy output that can be applied for comparative analyses of policy output.     

“Bluewashing” the Firm? Voluntary Regulations,Program Design,and Member Compliance with the United Nations Global Compact

Voluntary programs have emerged as important instruments of public policy. We explore whether programs lacking monitoring and enforcement mechanisms can curb participants’ shirking with program obligations. Incentive‐based approaches to policy see monitoring and enforcement as essential to curb shirking, while norm‐based approaches view social mechanisms such as norms and learning as sufficient to serve this purpose. The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), a prominent international voluntary program, encourages firms to adopt socially responsible policies. Its program design, however, relies primarily on norms and learning to mitigate shirking. Using a panel of roughly 3,000 U.S. firms from 2000 to 2010, and multiple approaches to address endogeneity and selection issues, we examine the effects of Compact membership on members’ human rights and environmental performance. We find that members fare worse than nonmembers on costly and fundamental performance dimensions, while showing improvements only in more superficial dimensions. Exploiting the lack of monitoring and enforcement, UNGC members are able to shirk: enjoying goodwill benefits of program membership without making costly changes to their human rights and environmental practices.     

Effects of Economic and Environmental Reform on the Diffusion of Cleaner Coal Technology in China

Despite the urgent need to address severe air pollution problems caused by China's coal consumption, diffusion of cleaner coal technologies (CCTs) has been slow. This contribution utilizes the fragmented authoritarianism model to explain this slow diffusion by examining the structure of bureaucratic decision making and changes in incentives that have accompanied fiscal decentralization and enterprise deregulation. Case studies on the diffusion of two CCTs — flue gas desulphurization (FGD) and coal washing — highlight challenges of environmental policy design and implementation during the economic reforms of the past decade. Enterprises had little incentive to adopt FGD when central government agencies disagreed on promoting the technology and local agencies did not rigorously enforce national air pollution control policies. For washed coal, production slowed when coal pricing reform and coal industry restructuring were not co‐ordinated with environmental policies. Further promotion of CCTs in China requires changes in incentive structures for local governments and enterprises, as well as enhanced policy co‐ordination among central government agencies.     

Renewable energy innovations and sustainability transition: How relevant are spatial spillovers?

In the societal challenge to switch to renewable energy, innovation has become an ever‐increasing critical determinant. However, while sustainability transition is a global challenge, diffusion and adoption of innovation tends to be uneven in space and unequal access may cause substantial heterogeneity in energy transition. This research analyzes how domestic and foreign innovation activities in the renewable energy sector influence energy transition over time. Empirical testing shows that a country's domestic innovation activity impacts renewable electricity generation capacity sooner than foreign technological innovations. I document that there are substantial barriers to substitute foreign technologies for domestic innovation efforts in the short run but also observe that foreign technologies have a stronger impact after some years. These findings have implications for cross‐border coordination of governmental innovation support and complementary policy instruments that aim at increasing adoption speed across borders.     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

Latinos and Environmental Justice: Examining the Link between Degenerative Policy,Political Representation,and Environmental Policy Implementation

The theory of social construction and policy design is insightful for exploring the circumstances in which the allocation of policy benefits and burdens is attributed to the feed‐forward effect of degenerative policy that institutionalizes bias and reinforces the prevailing categorization and embedded social meaning regarding target populations. However, this theoretical framework has not been broadly adopted to analyze the environment‐related phenomena. With a nationwide, block‐group‐level sample, this study examines the extent to which degenerative policies pertaining to immigrants influence state agencies' environmental regulatory outputs for predominantly Latino communities. Results show that in the states with moderately to most restrictive immigrant policy and high levels of Latino representation in legislatures, the rigorousness of government agencies' compliance monitoring activities decreases for Latino neighborhoods of environmental justice concern, as states' policy stance toward immigrants becomes more unfavorable. More Latino elected officials do not bolster policy implementation efforts for the vulnerable communities or offset the backlash effect of immigrant policy.     

Implementation of Chinese Environmental Law: Regular Enforcement and Political Campaigns

While China has made great strides in establishing environmental laws and enforcing environmental regulation, problems of non‐compliance and weak and slow enforcement remain. This contribution analyses cases of sub‐optimum enforcement and the political campaigns that have been undertaken to deal with them. It will argue that enforcement problems are rooted in a lack of local legitimacy caused by conflicting interests of stakeholders. The case of Chinese environmental law enforcement holds lessons beyond its regional scope, about the role of law in balancing interests. Law itself does not exist in a vacuum: on the contrary, it is very much the result of conflicting interests and can be seriously challenged by the need to balance these interests. The use of political campaigns to enhance enforcement in China shows that the flexibility of political short‐term policy instruments can offer incremental improvements to enhance the balance between the conflicting interests themselves and their relation with the legal system.     

Can national cultural policy approaches be used for sub‐national comparisons? An analysis of the Québec and Ontario experiences in Canada

There has been relatively little comparative research undertaken on sub‐national cultural policy. This article aims to contribute to the development of sub‐national comparative studies by assessing the utility of national cultural policy approaches for comparative research at the sub‐national level in Canada. Drawing on studies of national cultural policy, the authors develop three main approaches to cultural policy and administration – the French, British and hybrid approaches – and explore their applicability to the origin and evolution of cultural policy and administration in the Canadian provinces of Québec and Ontario. This exploratory research suggests there is room for optimism in drawing on national‐level experiences to undertake sub‐national comparative cultural policy research, particularly for comparisons over broad time periods. The study also suggests that it will be important in subsequent research to further elaborate the models for present‐day comparative analysis and to refine and adapt them to reflect specificities at the provincial level of analysis.     

Institutionalizing Participatory,Client-Driven Research and Technology Development in Agriculture

This article identifies key characteristics of participatory research and development(R&D) in the agricultural sector: it is client-driven, requires decentralized technology development, devolves to farmers the major responsibility for adaptive testing, and requires institutions and individuals to become accountable for the relevance and quality of technology on offer. Through case study material drawn from Latin America, Asia and Africa, the article then reviews ways by which institutions have responded to these characteristics and raises issues for further elaboration. Steps need to be taken, in particular, to safeguard equity, both between the more and less vocal groups of farmers, and between the requirements of present and future generations (the latter referring particularly to environmental concerns). It is argued that participatory R&D alone is insufficient to deliver innovations relevant to diverse client groups: policy mechanisms are required to define which clients are to participate, whose agendas are to drive the process, and what organizational innovations are needed to move agricultural R&D in these directions.     

Framed for Compromise? The Role of Bill Framing in State Legislative Behavior on Natural Gas Policy

State legislative decision making on natural gas policy has become a balancing act, as legislators are forced to grapple with tensions between economically beneficial policies and environmental impacts. Despite increased public attention to the benefits and costs related to hydraulic fracturing, there has been little scholarly attention paid to how policy framing affects legislator behavior on this issue. We analyze recorded votes on bills relating to natural gas policy in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico between 1999 and 2008; a time period spanning the recent boom. Using a novel database of bill frames, we create a ratio measure that accounts for the proportion of environmental to economic arguments within each piece of legislation. We find status quo–challenging, anti‐development policies can receive bipartisan support, as long as economic frames balance or are greater than environmental frames. Framing natural gas as a win‐win scenario where economic benefit and environmental protection can be achieved simultaneously is an effective legislative strategy. Using the case of natural gas policy, this study demonstrates bill framing substantively affects state legislator vote choice and implies bipartisan compromise is possible given the right balance of frames.     

News Photographs and Environmental Agenda Setting

Who and what influences the issues that policymakers attend to is central to the question of how power is exercised in politics. This study builds upon research by Soroka that proposes an expanded model of agenda setting as a means to examine how the media influences issue salience for the public and policymakers. It expands on Soroka's model by investigating the hypothesis that photographic attention to environmental issues in the news media influences issue salience for the mass public and governmental decision makers. There is little research that substantiates the idea, but it is widely believed that photographs have influence on the policy agenda. I use a dynamic, multidirectional model to estimate whether the volume of news photographs, in addition to news stories, influences issue salience among the mass public and policymakers. Data are longitudinal and measures of attention are operationalized as the number of congressional committee meetings, concern for the environment as a “most important problem” in public opinion polls, environmental news stories in The New York Times, and environmental news photographs in Time magazine. Results suggest that photographic attention does influence environmental policy agenda dynamics in some counterintuitive ways that are distinct from the effects of the news stories. While news stories appear to increase public attention toward the environment, they have little influence on policymaker attention. News photographs, on the other hand, appear to drive congressional committee attention but elicit an ambivalent public response.     

Do Voluntary Programs Reduce Pollution? Examining ISO 14001's Effectiveness across Countries

Voluntary environmental programs have emerged as important instruments of environmental policy. Despite considerable scholarly scrutiny, there remain debates about whether they reduce pollution among participants, and their overall impact at the country level. We present a cross‐national analysis of the efficacy of ISO 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world. While several single country studies have explored the effect of ISO 14001 participation on pollution reduction at the facility level, this is the first article to assess (i) national level pollution reduction effects of ISO 14001 participation levels, (ii) across a large number of countries, and (iii) across two pollutants. We examine whether all else equal, the national level uptakes of ISO 14001 are associated with reductions in air emissions (sulfur dioxide, SO₂) and water pollution (biochemical oxygen demand, BOD). Because firms, regulators, and environmental groups tend to focus more on visible types of pollution than less visible ones, we hypothesize that ISO 14001 uptake will be associated with more pronounced reductions in air pollution (visible) in relation to water pollution (less visible). Our analyses of pollution levels for a panel of 138 (72 for BOD) countries for the 1991–2005 period suggest that a 1 percent increase in aggregate levels of ISO 14001 adoption is associated with about a 0.064 percent reduction in SO₂ emissions, all else equal. In contrast, we do not find a statistically significant relationship between ISO 14001 adoption levels and changes in water pollution (BOD).     

Assessing the Empirical Impact of Environmental Federalism

Abstract Many theoretical models analyze the effects of decentralized environmental policymaking. The predictions range from a race to the top, a race to the bottom, or no effect. However, little empirical evidence exists to resolve this ambiguity. This paper fills the void by examining the impact of decentralized environmental policymaking in the U.S. under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. For abatement expenditures, Reagan's decentralization had no discernible impact before the mid‐1980s, but by the mid‐1980s the data are consistent with decentralization leading to a race to the top. No statistically significant effect is found on nitrogen oxide or sulfur dioxide emissions.